


Crux Redux

by Alexa_Piper



Category: Danny Phantom
Genre: And the Guys in White mess everything up, Blood in copious amounts from chapter eight onward if you need a warning for that, Fantasy elements and alternate universe, Lots of family relationships and stuff, a bit of body horror, no phantom planet
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-10-31
Updated: 2019-07-24
Packaged: 2019-08-10 21:29:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 10
Words: 38,316
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16462664
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Alexa_Piper/pseuds/Alexa_Piper
Summary: They've been keeping him in the dark all his life. When Danny finally learns the truth he's not exactly thrilled, and definitely not ready to comply. Revelation fic with a twist.





	1. Catalyst

They always came after the sun had left.

Maddie was sitting at the table, fingers still loosely curled around an empty mug while her other hand flipped to the next page of Scientific American. It was a special ghost edition, and there was no way she was letting it disappear into the abyss of Jack’s to-read pile until she had studied every page.

A sound flicked against her thoughts, and she ignored it at first. It was probably just a bird or something… Maddie dragged herself away from the article on the theory of spectral physics as the sound came again, glaring at the kitchen window. She couldn’t see much aside from her reflection in the glass, but then something shifted out there in the darkness. As a man leaned closer to the windowpane his face became clearer – tall and bald, with dark glasses that were always present no matter the hour of day. Behind him, dimly lit by the light from inside, was another vague figure.

Maddie pushed back her chair a little more forcefully then necessary, giving an exaggerated sigh. She stalked over to the window, unfastening the latch and swinging it open. “Would it kill you to use the door for once?” she snapped, stepping to the side so that her uninvited guests could hoist themselves through the opening.

“Negative,” the one who had knocked stated in a dead tone as he dragged himself through the window face-first, hooking his fingers over the edge of the bench and pulling himself forwards. He slithered to the ground in an ungainly pile, before quickly righting himself and inspecting his white suit with a frown. Maddie smirked – it was smeared with peanut butter that she hadn’t yet cleaned off the bench.

Jack entered the room and let out a groan as the other agent tried a feet-first approach, legs kicking wildly as his shoulders got stuck in the narrow window frame. Maddie smirked at her husband, before stepping towards the table and quickly folding down the corner of the page she had been reading. She shoved the magazine into a drawer of rarely-used recipe books – hopefully she’d have time to finish it later.

“It’s late,” Jack said, crossing his arms over his chest with a frown as the second agent finally wriggled himself into the room.

The first agent shrugged. He smoothed his peanut butter-smeared jacket before speaking. “The press has been overly active lately, so it is best if our visits are conducted at night.”

“The press has only been more active because you guys have been chasing Phantom everywhere,” Maddie retorted. She knew she was being hypocritical here, but lately the Guys in White had been taking things too far – they had actually released ghosts in the hopes of luring Phantom into a trap. High-powered ghosts, released in public with no way to control them! Hopefully, somebody lost their job over that one.

The first one shrugged again, and Jack snorted from across the kitchen. Agents K and O weren’t exactly unusual guests in the Fenton home, although they were unwelcome. K raised his eyebrows at Maddie’s comment, looking over the rims of his glasses in an expression that felt mildly condescending. His eyes were the blue of a dying day, the way the sky looked after the sun had set but before the light was gone. The Fentons had taken to calling him ‘Bright Eyes’ behind his back, sharing their amusement at the reference. For some reason, Jack had dubbed the other agent ‘Speckles,’ and the name had stuck.

The room was quiet for a moment while Speckles latched the window shut again. Maddie raised her chin and picked up her dirty mug, moving purposefully towards the sink. She hated the way her skin crawled whenever these men forced their way into her home, and for the past few years she had tried her best to reassert her dominance over her living space by dictating when their conversation would begin. She wasn’t going to play their games – if they wanted something, they had better speak up, otherwise she would just leave them standing there until she was ready to talk to them.

She turned the tap on and stuck her finger under the stream until it ran hot, before rinsing out her mug. A chair scraped on the floor, creaking with the tell-tale sound of Jack sinking into it. The agents were in her peripheral vision, and Maddie dripped some dishwashing liquid onto a sponge before swiping it over the surface of her mug. “Coffee, Jack?” she asked.

Their guests knew that she was not offering any to them.

“Nope, still full from that amazing dinner!”

Maddie gave a small nod, rinsing the suds off her now-clean mug before placing it on the drainer. She dried her hands on the front of her hazmat suit and sat back down at the table, finally turning to give the agents her attention.

Irritation was evident in the way they stood, stiff and scowling. It raised Maddie’s mood just enough that she thought she might be able to get through whatever this conversation was going to be without shooting something.

Bright Eyes took a seat without further invitation, followed by his co-worker. With their glasses on they looked almost identical. Bright Eyes had a stockier and slightly taller frame, and Speckles’ chin was more pointed, but that was about it when it came to differences.

Neither spoke, tilting their heads as though looking at each other for some sort of cue.

“What do you want?” Maddie demanded, her tone terse and clipped. She was too tired for this crap right now – a quick glance at her watch confirmed that it was after eleven. “If it’s another sample, I swear – ”

“Your willingness is certainly inspiring. However, we do not require anything of that nature today.”

Maddie bristled, clenching her hands together on the tabletop to stop herself from shouting. Jack reached across, placing his hand over hers. The contact was instantly soothing, and Maddie took a slow breath, pushing past her anger. A fight wouldn’t accomplish anything.

Bright Eyes continued as though he hadn’t noticed her stress, “We are implementing a new procedure. You of all people are aware how difficult it can be for us to monitor hybrids, so a registration system is required.” He paused as though waiting for something, but Maddie simply scowled at him. “So, from tomorrow night, we will begin the mandatory registration.”

“Look,” Jack sighed, “is this because of Vladdie? Because I really don’t –”

“Plasmius is not the issue here,” Speckles snapped.

“Then what is the issue? It’s not as though Amity Park is crawling with halfas.” There it was, that unusual word. It was thick on Maddie’s tongue, and she pursed her lips, uncomfortable with how… uncomfortable she was to give voice to those two syllables.

It had been a long time since she had had a conversation like this.

Now it was Bright Eyes’ turn to adjust his glasses. “There are more of them than you are aware of,” he said. “In the past few years the number of half-ghosts has increased by fifty per cent.”

Maddie scowled. “So… there were two but now there are three?”

The agents’ silence was enough to answer her question.

“Who is it?” Jack asked, his voice catching as though it had clawed its way up his throat. “Who came out of the Ghost Zone?”

“I think you already know,” Bright Eyes responded, and even though Maddie couldn’t see his eyes she knew that he was staring at her. She felt like she was being studied, a specimen under a microscope or a rat in a cage. She fidgeted, fingers sliding over the grooves between each link in the band of her watch.

She knew who it was.

Jack seemed to have caught on as well. “You’re really going to build an entire system for one teenager?” he demanded, raising an eyebrow. His hand found Maddie’s again, pulling her fingers away from her watch and beginning to rub the stress out of her knuckles with gentle motions.

“Halfas are unpredictable.”

Maddie glared at Speckles. “You can’t say that,” she snapped, anger rushing through her. “You can’t just study two or three halfas and say that everyone has the same behavioural patterns.”

“Halfas has proven to be… dangerous in the past.”

Maddie stood abruptly, the chair almost falling behind her with the force. “What are you saying?” she shouted, heat sweeping across her face as her hands clenched into fists. If she could, she would have shot them, here and now.

The agents seemed unperturbed. “We meant Plasmius.”

The heat in her face felt wrong. It always did, it shouldn’t be hot – it should be so cold it burned – and Maddie took a deep, shuddering breath. “You have ten seconds,” she hissed. “What are you here for?”

Bright Eyes inclined his head. “We are here to remove your watch.”

Maddie’s gut clenched, and she braced herself against the edge of the table. “What?” She didn’t like how small her voice had become.

Speckles stood, reaching out his hand. “Our system is enforced by a gun installed in the main square of the city,” he explained. Maddie felt a tremor ripple through her as he rounded the table and closed his fingers over her left wrist. He held a tool in his hand, its end shaped to fit over the face of the watch that she had been forced to wear for decades. “If your ectosignature is inhibited by your suppressor, the gun may unintentionally target you. It will shoot anything with an ectosignature that isn’t in its database. Quite an ingenious way to study all kind of spectres, including any unknown halfas...”

“And what about the others?” Maddie snapped, forcing herself to stay still as the tool clipped to her watch and Speckles began to twist it like a spanner.

“Plasmius is already registered.”

“And Phantom?” Jack asked.

Maddie glanced at her husband. They had all already known, but for someone to finally say it was jarring. Phantom was not a ghost, but they had all danced around the topic for so long that it felt like nobody was ever going to acknowledge the truth.

Her watch clicked and fell away from her wrist, and Speckles stepped back, giving her space.

The room was silent again, just for a moment, and then Maddie gasped involuntarily. It was like taking off shoes that you had been wearing for hours that were too tight, or rolling over in bed because you got pins and needles – something rushed through her veins like a strong winter wind, welling up from deep within her body, and every breath held that sharp, painful tang of breathing as hard as you could after sprinting in the snow, or surfacing and finally filling your lungs after they had been burning for air as you dove in deep water…

The rushing stopped, and Maddie was left clutching the edge of the table, drawing in deep, heavy breaths as her core pulsed with freedom. A thin layer of glittering ice spread beneath her fingers, unbidden but not unwelcome.

She finally looked up, and the first thing she saw was her reflection in the dark glass of the kitchen window. Her hair crackled white, like shooting stars that sparked in the night when she moved. Her skin was so pale, and her eyes… Her eyes were pools of green, glowing so brightly that their shape was blurred by the haze of spectral energy.

She swallowed. Another deep breath helped to ground her a little bit more, and the ice finally stopped spreading. By now it had covered almost the entire table. The agents were both standing now, Bright Eyes’ hand resting on the gun strapped to his hip. It should have been threatening, but Maddie was satisfied by this display of fear. It was just a little, temporary thing, but seeing them out of their comfort zone for a change was refreshing.

“Spirit-”

“Don’t even try to start calling me that again,” Maddie said, finally peeling her hands away from the table. Jack was standing as well, a solid presence behind her back as she struggled to reign in her freezing core. All of a sudden she was starving, and she needed space – the portal hummed downstairs, the endless expanse of the Ghost Zone calling to her. She pushed the thought away, pushing her core down at the same time. This was harder than it should be, and Maddie frowned. She pushed again, her core burning with frost and hunger, and slowly that familiar light wrapped around her and tucked her power back beneath her skin.

She swept frizzy auburn hair out of her eyes, breathing like she had just sprinted across town. Her ghost form was tied down again, not by the limiting watch but by her own will, and Maddie’s face was slick with sweat from the effort. Jack had placed his hands on her shoulders at some point, steadying her, grounding her…

Bright Eyes looked amused, the corners of his mouth curving upwards ever so slightly. “The gun will activate tomorrow at midnight,” he said. “Meet us there at eleven thirty. And Maddie… this isn’t an excuse for you to start acting out. Just because your core is no longer bound doesn’t mean that we aren’t watching you.”

With that, they turned to leave. Maddie frowned, her breathing still uneven and her hands still shaking. They were missing something –

“Wait,” Jack called as Bright Eyes swung the window open. “What about Phantom?”

The agent paused. “He will need to be registered for the gun to know not to shoot his ectosignature.”

“And how do you plan to do that?” Jack scoffed. “You’ve never really been good at catching him in the past.”

Neither of them answered, and Maddie’s thoughts couldn’t seem to catch up. “Wait,” she said as Speckles hauled himself up onto the counter and stuck his legs through the window. “What will the gun do if Phantom isn’t registered?”

Speckles didn’t say anything, and slid through the window without looking at her again. Bright Eyes pulled himself onto the bench, and Maddie lurched forwards, closing her fingers around his wrist. Everything seemed to go still, and Maddie could see her reflection in his dark glasses.

Bright Eyes pulled out of her grasp, pushing himself through the window as though he hadn’t heard her. Maddie stood there for a moment, staring into the darkness, when a voice filtered through the night. “You have twenty-four hours to warn him.”

A cloud passed overhead, cutting off the moon’s dim light, and they were gone.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> An old fic of mine redone but also not… I guess this is what Crux would have been if I had actually known anything about writing. I don't really know where this will go, but it will be similar to the original, just... better.
> 
> Please ignore me, this is really for my own satisfaction because I've always felt guilty that I didn't finish the original version.


	2. Shivers

Sleep was impossible.

No matter how much she repositioned herself, Maddie could not get comfortable. Her veins buzzed with power, thoughts kicking into high gear as though adrenaline had been poured into her system. Ectoplasm tended to do that to you – after all, it _was_ the closest a physical substance could get to being pure energy.

For over twenty years she had been bound. The inhibitor in that watch had suppressed the ectoplasm in her system so thoroughly that she hadn’t even been able to feel her core, and now, with power rushing through her bones, it took every ounce of effort for Maddie to keep herself from clawing her skin off.

Next to her, Jack snored as he always did, blissfully asleep and oblivious to his wife’s discomfort. The alarm clock on the bedside table glowed a dim red, and Maddie sighed. It was already four thirty in the morning, and she had to be up by seven to make sure Danny got to school.

Thoughts of Danny led her to think of another teenager. How were they supposed to find Phantom? She had to warn him.

The ghost boy had been a bit of a dilemma for the Fentons lately. They knew he used their portal, but they could never catch him doing it. They knew he drank the ectoplasm from their filters, but there was no evidence that it was him. They knew he would sneak through their home, invisible and silent, but none of their specialised equipment had picked up more than a brief ectosignature.

His breathing was always loud during fights, and when he bled there was something dark mixed with the glowing green. He would disappear from their sensors like a light switching off, his core obviously insulated by a living body. Sometimes they would overhear him grumble about interrupted sleep, or a ruined assignment, or missing out on a movie thanks to a ghost attack.

It was obvious when you took the time to look. They _knew_ that he was a halfa, but had no way to prove it.

And now they had to figure out a way to contact the kid before that gun in the middle of town blasted him out of the sky.

Maddie rolled over with a groan. How should she approach this? Fly through the sky calling Phantom’s name? Put banners up all over town asking him to meet them? Plaster their lab with notes in the hope that he would use the portal before midnight? None of these plans sounded very successful, and Maddie rubbed her eyes in frustration. They stung with exhaustion, and she decided to settle down and really try to get some sleep.

Her feet were cold.

Sighing, Maddie sat up and swung her legs over the side of the bed. Her toes quested in the dark, nudging against fluffy green slippers. She put them on, grateful for the warm softness, and quietly got to her feet. It was starting to get cold at night, and she pulled on a dressing gown before leaving the room. Before all of this, before ever deciding to leave the Ghost Zone or agreeing to have her powers bound, she had never felt the cold. Now it was inside her as much as without, and Maddie knew that it would take some time to adjust.

Out in the dark hallway a light shone through the crack beneath Danny’s door. Maddie’s frustration mounted, and she strode into her son’s room. “Do you have any idea what time it is?” she hissed.

Danny was slumped at his desk, head down and motionless. His breathing was deep with sleep, a slight snore rasping with each inhalation. The sight tugged at her heart, and Maddie crossed the room, placing a gentle hand on his shoulder. “Come on,” she said, “time for bed.”

She frowned when her core pulsed, cold washing through her as she squeezed her son’s shoulder. “Danny?” she whispered, fear gripping her chest. This couldn’t be right… Her core must be acting up after so long without functioning.

And yet her ghost sense buzzed, her fingers tingling from the close proximity to the ectoplasm that rushed through Danny’s veins.

Maddie swore before she could stop herself, pulling her hand back sharply. Danny took a shuddering breath, his eyelids fluttering before sinking back down into stillness.

Horror began to build within her. How had he activated his core? What had he been _doing…_? Her thoughts slid into place, and Maddie’s world stopped. _Three_ halfas – Maddie, Vlad, and…

She shook her head, trying to clear it. She couldn’t just guess that her son was Phantom, she needed to see it for herself. She could have it all wrong – her core could just be sensitive after being bound for so long, and reacting to the inactivated core that her son had inherited from her.

She placed her hand on his shoulder again and gave it a gentle shake. “Danny?”

His forehead scrunched as he mumbled something, and through his shirt Maddie felt his skin lose all warmth. His breath was visible for one long exhalation, and she snatched her hand back for a second time.

Maddie’s contact had undeniably triggered a ghost sense in her son.

Danny stirred, taking a sharp breath that signalled his transition to wakefulness. “Where’s the ghost?” he mumbled.

“No ghost,” Maddie said, reaching out to touch him again but stopping before she could, hands hovering around his shoulders. Instead, she changed her course and closed the physics textbook that was lying beside his head. “You fell asleep studying. Your back’s going to be killing you in the morning.”

Danny sat up properly with a groan, interlocking his fingers and stretching his hands above his head. “Thanks,” he said, dropping his arms and getting to his feet. “What time is it?”

“About four thirty,” Maddie responded, busying herself by searching for a set of pyjamas. Her heart skipped a beat when, tucked in the drawer beneath them, she noticed a Fenton thermos.

“Mum, I can get those,” Danny said, moving towards her. He stopped when he saw the revealed contents of the drawer.

Maddie curled her fingers around the smooth cylindrical surface, lifting it out of the drawer. It wasn’t actually that smooth, now that she saw it in proper light – the thermos was dented in places, its surface pitted and gouged with what look like claw marks.

Danny suddenly seemed _very_ uncomfortable. “Uh… Well, I carry that to stay safe?”

She simply raised an eyebrow, and Danny didn’t seem to know what to do with his hands – he clenched and unclenched his fingers, his breathing short and choppy. The fear rolled off him in a sudden overwhelming _wave_ , and Maddie felt her own breathing hitch. She dropped the battle-scarred thermos as her core reeled with the unexpected emotional hit, and it hit the carpet with a dull thud.

They both stared at each other, Danny’s fear dropping back to a muted throbbing laced with a confused undertone, and Maddie knew that he was responding to the distress that buzzed through her body.

The communication was somewhere beyond the physical plane, and with every second of silence the confusion from Danny mounted.

Maddie forced her thoughts to swim through her shock, bending down to pick up the thermos. “Butterfingers,” she said, smiling and offering the item to her son. “That’s what I get for not sleeping tonight. You should put this in your schoolbag if you want it to be there when you need it.”

As he took the thermos from her, she made sure that their fingers didn’t touch. There was one thought that she just couldn’t move past – Danny was scared... Of _her._

Maddie pushed the thought away as her son stowed the thermos in his backpack. Still, if he _was_ Phantom, there was something that she needed to say now, while she still had the chance. She just didn’t know how to start…

Danny frowned at her. “Uh, Mum? You’re spacing out.”

He was wary, and she had no clue what to say. “I’m just tired,” she responded, trying to give a comforting smile.

He didn’t seem convinced.

The silence stretched, and Maddie knew she had to say something. “Do you know Phantom?”

Danny scowled. “Everyone knows Phantom.” His emotions spiked again, panicked and confused.

“I’m trying to contact him,” she confessed. Transparency was best right now, even if it meant saying things she wasn’t ready to say. Wherever the conversation went, she needed to tell Danny enough to keep him safe. “The Guys in White were here earlier to tell us about new ghost security and we wanted to warn him.”

Danny’s expression was unreadable, but his unrestrained emotional output was a mess of anxiety. “Phantom’s never been caught by their stuff before,” he said, and reached around his mother for the forgotten pyjamas. Maddie shifted, careful that he didn’t touch her.

“This security system targets half-ghost hybrids.”

Danny jolted back as though burned, eyes snapping to meet hers. “You said that those aren’t real.”

There was something about the way he had started to tremble that unsettled her, more than simply feeling his emotional state with her core. “They’re not scientifically proven in the public eye, but…” she trailed off, unsure what to say. Danny’s eyes were wide, breathing catching in short staccato bursts. He had shifted the way he was standing, as though preparing to defend himself from some sort of physical onslaught.

Maddie’s heart ached as his terror washed over her. “Oh, Honey,” she sighed, reaching across and finally closing a hand around his wrist. Her body chilled at the contact, and a visible shiver ran through her son’s limbs. The ghost sense for physical contact was different when it was a halfa – when someone was overshadowed, you could feel the separate energy forces from the ghost’s core and the human’s heart, but for halfas the sensation became a smooth blend of heart and core beating together. Touching like this, skin-to-skin, they both felt the exact same thing.

The colour drained from Danny’s face. “Enough,” he hissed, eyes darting to her wrist. “You’re not my mum.”

Maddie struggled to push past the hurt that bloomed within her. Danny obviously felt her emotion, face twisting in confusion. “My mum always wears a watch,” he ground through gritted teeth. “Pretty good job, but not good enough.”

Maddie released his arm and he stepped back, opening up the space between them. She raised her wrist in a slow movement, angling it so that the light caught her skin. “I took it off,” she said, a strip of skin white from lack of sunlight. “It was a limiter, and the Guys in White needed it off so that their fancy new system didn’t attack my suppressed ectosignature.”

Again, they stood there in silence. Danny seemed ready for a fight, his hands fisted and feet slightly apart. Maddie read all this and tried her best to look non-confrontational. She dropped her arm and hugged her dressing gown tight around herself. Her toes curled inside her slippers, and she sighed when Danny showed no signs of breaking this strange stand-off.

The sound seemed to do the trick. “You’re a halfa,” Danny breathed. “I could feel it in your skin.”

Maddie met his gaze. He was still scared, sure, but that had toned down a bit now. Instead, something else was seeping through his shock – something raw and powerful. “Yes,” she said simply.

Danny’s mouth hung open, brows furrowing when she didn’t say anything else. His eyes glowed green with emotion. “That’s it?” he hissed. “That’s all you’re gunna say?!” His volume mounted and anger radiated from him. “I’ve been so… so damned _scared_ that you were about to rip me into tiny pieces, I was _terrified_ that you’d shoot me out of the sky, wrap me up in a net and haul me down to the lab for your next experiment! I was scared of you every single day,” he shouted, “every _single_ day! But here you are, and all this time you’ve been _exactly the same as me!_ ” His breathing hitched, tears sliding down his cheeks, and Maddie couldn’t have felt worse if her son had punched her.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered, hating how her voice caught. Her eyes were hot and full, and when she blinked, tears slipped free.

Something stirred on the other side of the wall, and Maddie knew that Danny’s shouting had probably woken her husband. Moments later, Jack burst into the room with a guttural battle cry. “Where’s the ghost?!” He brandished a massive blaster, finger hovering over the trigger.

Danny took a step backwards, hands flying up in a defensive gesture. The bright green glow bled from his eyes, dimming them back to their natural hue, but he hadn’t been fast enough to hide it.

The gun whined as its sensor picked up on the energy in the air. “ _Ectosignature identified. Core detected. Ready to fire._ ”

“Jack!” Maddie shouted, throwing up her own hands and summoning a defensive shield. The room flashed bright with the gun’s energy blast, which hit Danny’s own shield and dissipated into wisps of light that dissolved like spent fireworks.

For a moment, the only sound in the room was three sets of heavy breathing. Smoke rose lazily from the barrel of the blaster, coiling past Jack’s stupefied face and filling the room with a smell like burnt hair. “Dann-o?” he whispered.

Danny dropped his hands, the shield melting into nothingness with a faint crackle. He was still crying, and wiped his nose on his sleeve. “For once, you could wait before you shoot at me,” he snapped.

Jack’s hurt stabbed at Maddie’s senses, and the gun drooped towards the floor. “You… You’re…”

Danny shook his head, stepping back as his father tried to move towards him. “Stay back!” he shouted, hands up and defensive again.

Jack stopped. “Son–”

A loud sob was all that their son could seem to manage. Then, “Just leave me alone.”

Danny clenched his eyes shut, a chill swept through the room, and then he was gone.


	3. Fissure

Teleportation still wasn’t his strong suit. Breaking yourself down and squeezing your essence through the physical plane to another location was something that came naturally to a spectral core, but it tugged at Danny’s human organs, wringing him like a sponge. Accuracy was especially difficult. Instead of his intended destination Danny reappeared in the middle of the street, six feet in the air and completely disoriented. Before he realised his predicament he was reclaimed by gravity. Vertigo swept over him in a dizzying wave and he smacked into the bitumen with a grunt, his hip and shoulder colliding first, followed by the side of his skull.

The streetlight smeared across the night as his vision blurred and Danny simply lay there, trying to gather his rattled thoughts. The air was quiet with the hush of that stillness just before the dark sky began to turn grey at the edges, and he drew in ragged breaths, squeezing his eyes shut and letting out a sob as things came rushing back to him. Everything was heavy, weighing him down and squeezing away everything unrelated to the events in his bedroom.

What the hell had just happened?

Puffing out his cheeks, he blew a steady stream of air through pursed lips. He was already trembling, whether from the sudden fall or from the panic of the last five minutes he didn’t know, but everything inside him screamed that he was hurt.

Another sob, and Danny curled onto his side and clapped a hand over his mouth. His throat was clenched, tears began to squeeze past his eyelids, and pain welled up from somewhere deep within him. It washed over him in a wave, and suddenly he was weeping, curled up and shuddering with loud sobs in the middle of the street outside Tucker’s house. On some level he was surprised at himself, but the stress had combined with something else, something far too tender to even begin to identify, and the emotions needed a way out. He knew why, but admitting it would just make everything even worse.

He had to stop. He was surprised that he had even begun, and now Danny’s head throbbed with the hot ache that comes from crying too much, and asphalt dug painfully into his exposed arms. He didn’t need to be seen like this – everyone in town knew the Fentons by now, and the last thing he wanted was for some well-meaning early-morning jogger to call his parents because he was sobbing hysterically in the foetal position on a residential street.

He sat up, sniffing loudly. Cold fingers quested in the direction of his pocket, taking a couple of tries to find the opening before realising that it was empty. Danny frowned, checking his other pocket before dropping his shoulders with a quiet huff. Great. He didn’t even have his phone with him.

He shakily got to his feet, having half a mind to just fly up to Tucker’s room from where he was standing. The more rational part of his brain pushed through the haze, reminding him that all it would take was for one person to see him and he’d have a much bigger problem to deal with than just his parents.

Stupid secrets.

Dragging his feet, Danny moved into the relative cover between two parked cars. It wasn’t much, but he really couldn’t be bothered with anything else right now, and he crouched down before turning himself invisible.

He was so tired, and that headache wasn’t going away. Danny wondered which would use more energy at this rate – flying up and phasing himself through the wall, or invisibly walking up the three flights of stairs to the Foleys’ apartment and phasing in that way. Both options sucked, in the way that any exertion was so beyond his tolerance right now, but Danny conceded that flying was faster and that the stairs would just make him feel more miserable.

He sniffed again, keeping himself out of the visible spectrum as he straightened up. Danny tilted his body into weightlessness, his centre of gravity shifting away from his feet and leaning instead on his core. He floated upwards slowly, like a sad helium balloon that was beginning to lose its buoyancy, pausing outside Tucker’s room. He closed his eyes and took a deep breath before passing through the brickwork like it wasn’t even there.

It seemed like he wasn’t the only one who had had a rough night.

Tucker was sprawled on top of his bed, glasses askew on his face and cheek resting against a page of what Danny recognised to be their physics textbook. The only light came from a small reading lamp, and scribbled sheets of loose paper were scattered around and beneath his friend’s body. Tucker hadn’t even taken off his shoes yet and Danny sighed, rubbing his eyes before shifting his gravity back to normal and landing to sit on the edge of the bed.

“Hey, Tuck,” he whispered, gently shaking his shoulder.

Tucker didn’t budge.

Danny grunted in exasperation and tried to grasp his paper-thin patience. This wasn’t Tucker’s fault, after all. He gave his shoulder another shake. “Tuck, I need to talk to you,” he hissed.

When Tucker remained oblivious, Danny leaked a bit of cold from his core and felt it travel down his own arm and dissipate through the sleeping boy’s skin.

Tucker jolted as though he’d been slapped. “Geroff!” he shouted, waving his arms at the rude awakening. They sailed harmlessly through Danny, who simply sat on the edge of the bed and waited for him to wake up enough that he was actually coherent.

Realising that he wasn’t actually under attack, Tucker stopped slapping the air. Papers crunched beneath him as he sat up with a groan. “Dude,” he grumbled as he straightened his glasses, “I told you to stop doing that.” Frost flowers had bloomed across his arm where Danny’s pulse of cold had made contact, and the boy scrubbed his hand over the ice vigorously.

Danny stayed quiet and Tucker blinked a couple of times, rubbing his eyes beneath his lenses before squinting at his friend. “Dude, what happened?” he breathed. “You look wrecked.”

Danny inhaled sharply, biting down on his lower lip to try to stop it from its sudden trembling. He fisted his fingers in the covers, looking away from his friend and trying to calm down.

Tucker scooted closer, shoving paperwork onto the floor and putting a hand on his shoulder. “What happened?” he asked again, gentler this time. “Are you hurt?”

Danny didn’t really know the answer to that, but he settled with shaking his head. The scrapes from his fall outside were already starting to heal, and his headache was definitely from tears and not a concussion. Sure, he hurt, but it wasn’t due to the fall.

It took a few more seconds for him to try to speak. “They found out,” he whispered. The words were heavy, weighing him down and making it difficult to think beyond that simple earth-shattering fact.

Saying it made it more real, more definite, and Danny kept his gaze on Tucker’s messy floor instead of looking at his friend. He could make out all sorts of things down there in the gloom, like the physics worksheets, a lone shoe, and peeking out from underneath more paper was an ectogun plugged into the charger in the dark alcove beneath Tucker’s desk.

“Okay.” Tucker radiated exhaustion, and maybe a bit of frustration. The emotions rubbed against Danny’s senses and he hung his head, desperately holding back his tears. “Okay, let me call Sam. You got your phone?”

Danny shook his head but otherwise didn’t move as Tucker began shuffling through the papers that surrounded them. Weary disbelief tugged at him from his best friend, and it weighed down on Danny’s mind. He ignored it, hunching his shoulders and trying not to panic as thoughts of home began to rise to the surface.

Danny had planned what to do if his parents ever found out. Their strategy was pinned down to the finest detail – Tucker finding his phone with an exclamation and immediately calling Sam was simply part of the process. It was all carefully structured to minimise the risks, and lately he felt like it was also there to keep his two friends from losing their sanity.

He had never factored in the possibility of something like this. Sure, maybe he’d entertained thoughts of running into his deceased parents as ghosts sometime in the hopefully-distant future, and what he might do in that situation, but never had he even once entertained the notion that somebody else in his family could have ghost powers.

He had no clue what to do.

Sam’s phone rang out twice before she answered, and even without speaker Danny could hear her, thanks to his heightened hearing.

“Do you have any idea what time it is?!”

“The Fentons found out.”

Tucker didn’t need to elaborate, but his voice lacked any of the urgency that should have been there. And maybe Danny deserved it – there had been several close calls lately, a lot of false alarms, and he knew that they were getting tired of his constant panic. The boy who cried wolf and all that…

Her sigh was clearly audible from where Danny sat. “For real this time?”

“It doesn’t matter,” Tucker snapped, and Danny wondered if that spike in frustration was thanks to Sam or himself. “He’s at my place, no phone with him, and he looks like an absolute mess. It’s your turn to check out his house.”

“I’ll go as soon as the sun’s up, say we have to study early to compare notes for our physics assignment since it’s due today.”

“Thanks,” Tucker said.

Sam simply hung up, and Danny frowned at the floor. Neither of them moved for a moment, and Tucker finally sighed, the mattress rising with sudden lack of pressure as he got to his feet. Grey light seeped around the edges of the curtains, and Tucker fished a towel out of the pile of clothes on his floor. “You wanna shower?” he asked.

Danny shook his head and Tucker sighed again, grabbing some clothes off the floor as well before heading towards the door.

“They really found out this time,” Danny said.

Tucker paused, turning halfway to look back at his friend. His face was shadowed, and Danny couldn’t make out his expression, but once again the lack of alarm was obvious. “Did they hurt you?”

Danny shook his head again, still not looking at his friend.

“What happened?”

He pulled his feet up onto the bed, curling in on himself and wrapping his arms around his knees. “I’ll tell you when Sam gets here,” Danny muttered. “I don’t want to answer your questions twice.”

Tucker shrugged and headed out of the room. His irritation had seeped away by now, and Danny tried not to be frustrated by the nonchalance he sensed in its stead. This happened all the time, of course they had gotten used to it.

Once the door had clicked shut, Danny swept the rest of the papers into a pile and placed them on top of the textbook before shifting to sit with his back leaning against the wall. A minute later the pipes behind the plaster shuddered and he closed his eyes, leaning his throbbing head back as well. Maybe if he just got ten minutes of sleep, this stupid headache would go away…

The wall throbbed as someone pounded on the bathroom door, and Danny grunted, sitting up properly again.

“Tucker, you’ve been in there for half an hour! Get out, or help pay the water bill!”

His head did feel clearer after that quick nap, and Danny yawned. The light that bled through the curtains was gold now, and he rubbed eyes that burned with exhaustion. His body felt like a worn-out punching bag with stuffing leaking from the seams, but at least that headache was gone. The pipes squeaked as the water shut off, and Danny glanced at Tucker’s phone as the screen lit up with a chime.

The text displayed on the lock screen was from Sam – At the park.

Unlocking the phone with the passcode that they all knew, Danny sent back a quick Be there soon.

Footsteps approached the door, the wrong weight to be Tucker’s, and Danny slipped out of the visible spectrum as Angela walked into the room. She paused as she stepped over the threshold, frowning at the paper and clothing strewn over the floor. She tugged her dressing gown closer before picking her way across the carpet, settling to sit on the edge of the bed. Danny drew his legs up as quietly as he could so that she didn’t sit in his intangible limbs, and hoped that she wouldn’t feel the cold that always flowed from him whenever he used his powers. He had read about nuclear meltdowns and radioactive waste and wondered if he was similar, but with bone-biting cold instead of bone-melting radiation. Sam had said something about him absorbing heat energy from the air, and that’s why he felt cold to everyone around him, but Tucker had just argued that ghosts can break whatever laws of physics they want.

Tucker’s phone chimed from where Danny had dropped it back onto the bed, and Angela picked it up. Danny couldn’t see her face but the sudden stress that rolled off her was more than enough to set his teeth on edge. Before he could try to see over her shoulder to read whatever the phone said, Tucker walked into the room. He stopped when he saw his mother there, nervous anxiety washing through the room.

“The Fentons called,” Angela said by way of greeting. “Danny ran off about an hour ago.”

“Oh, really?” Tucker said. He took a step towards the bed, frowning in an approximation of concern. Even without Danny’s ability to sense emotions, the expression was clearly insincere.

“Really,” Angela said, her tone clipped as suspicion laced the air. “He’s not in your cupboard or hiding under your bed?”

Tucker shook his head, hands up in denial. “No, why would you-”

“I heard your voices,” she informed him. Leaning over the edge of the bed, Angela swept aside the hanging blankets. “Come out please, Danny.”

“Mum!” Tucker gasped. Fear filled the room, from both of them, and Danny felt like he’d been punched by its sheer intensity.

Angela sat back up, slowly, and Tucker visibly swallowed. “It’s not what you think,” he tried weakly. His hands had dropped, shoulders sagging, and exhaustion was suddenly etched on his face. It gathered in the deep crevasses beneath his eyes, in the tired looseness of his mouth, in the way that his hands hung limply by his sides.

Around her shoulder, Danny could see that Angela was how holding Tucker’s phone in one hand and a sleek ectogun in the other. The phone chimed again, its screen automatically lighting up. Danny leaned forwards a little bit more, careful not to touch her, and saw two messages from Sam. The first one said They found out, and the newest one said I’m here.

Danny felt their secrets slipping through their fingers, and he shifted backwards again as Angela shivered. Tucker was looking over Angela’s shoulder, gaze directed to where he probably knew that Danny was sitting. Danny turned his head visible, making a helpless expression before turning invisible again. Tucker seemed to draw some strength from the knowledge that Danny hadn’t run out on him. “The Fentons gave it to me,” he said. “Since there are so many ghost attacks they said that I needed to be able to defend myself.”

Angela’s mood shifted from sheer terror to something akin to relief, but it was stunted by disbelief. “Maddie wouldn’t give you a gun.”

Tucker shrugged. “She has in the past. Y’know, when there’ve been big attacks.”

She stood up, and Danny shifted uneasily. He didn’t like where this conversation was heading.

“Maddie might give you a gun during a fight, but never to keep,” Angela responded. She hefted the weapon as though testing its weight. “This one looks far too powerful and expensive.”

Tucker raised his chin, a spark of frustration worming its way past his anxiety. “Yeah, well, she did,” he snapped.

Angela’s stance was confident. “So I’ll just call and ask her, hm?”

Tucker froze, mouth open as he was caught in his lie. “Well, uh,” he stammered, “Danny actually gave it to me, b-but Mrs Fenton really did say that we could each have a weapon to defend ourselves from ghosts!”

Danny bit back a groan, working his lower lip between his teeth as his face drew into a scowl. Angela was one of those parents who could sometimes be pretty chill, but when she was concerned about something you could bet your life that she’d check the facts. He could already hear his parents grounding him for the rest of the year for giving his friends such high-grade weapons.

Angela’s sigh was heavy. “Alright,” she relented, and held out Tucker’s phone. “Where are you meeting Sam?”

Tucker gave a shaky laugh. “Oh, that?” he said. “You see, we have a physics assignment due, and we were gunna meet and compare notes.”

Angela tilted her head, and Danny wished he could have seen her face as her exasperation swelled over her son’s anxiety. “Who found out what?” she asked.

Tucker took the phone, mouth tightening as he read the two messages on the screen. His eyes were shadowed as he looked down, tension obvious across his shoulders.

The lie was too slow this time. “She’s talking about her parents finding out that she skipped class to go to a concert last week,” he said.

Danny’s core told him that Angela didn’t buy it. “Tell Danny that I’ll give him a day to sort out whatever’s going on before I call his parents about this,” she said. “And after your assignment is done, you’re grounded for the weekend. Come straight home after school.”

“Aw, man!” Tucker whined, tucking his phone into his pocket. “What for?”

Even without seeing her face, Danny knew that Angela would be raising an eyebrow at the question. “The gun,” she snapped, “and for whatever lie you’ve just told me.”

Tucker huffed, but had the sense to back down. Danny stayed where he was, the sheer awkwardness of the argument screaming for him to leave, but morbid curiosity trapping him in his seat. He wondered how much Angela had figured out, and what his mother had said to her on the phone, but appearing from nothing to ask her probably wasn’t the best idea.

She left the room with the gun tucked in the crook of her arm, and as soon as the door clicked shut Danny threw himself off the bed. “Do you think she knows?” he hissed.

Tucker shrugged, fishing his schoolbag off the floor and beginning to shove papers into it. “Dude, you’d know better than me thanks to your emotion thing,” he murmured.

Danny threw up his hands, more as an outlet for himself than to contribute to the conversation since he was still invisible. The last thing they needed was for Angela to open the door without warning and see him there. “I’m so stressed, I don’t even know what to think anymore,” he whispered.

Tucker turned to look at the empty space above where Danny’s feet had just shifted some of the papers on the floor. “How did your parents find out?”

Danny’s chest tightened as all the hurt rushed back in at once. He swallowed, trying to fight down the sudden overwhelming sense that his world was about to fall apart. “It’s complicated,” he said, trying not to think of how his mother’s skin had felt against his own. “Let’s just go meet Sam.”

Tucker shouldered his bag. “I’ll meet you downstairs,” he said. “If my mum thinks I climbed out my window again she’ll probably extend my grounding for a month.”

Danny nodded even though nobody would be able to see it. “It can’t be as bad as mine,” he said. “The way things are going, I doubt I’ll be free for the rest of the year.”

Tucker shrugged. “Maybe your grades’ll finally go up,” he teased.

Danny grunted, turning visible and playfully blasting his friend with freezing air. Tucker squawked, rubbing his hands over his arms as Danny chuckled and floated back through the wall.


	4. Dawn

The park in the middle of town could most kindly be described by the word _minimalist_. Or maybe a battle zone would be more accurate. Ghost attacks had stripped the area of the majority of its vegetation, and the children’s play equipment had chunks missing from its steel support beams. A running track snaked through garden beds that were spotted with craters, many of the holes suspiciously Danny-sized. The lawn was scorched in places, torn up in others, and any surviving trees were missing a good amount of foliage.

Still, it was better to fight over the park than cause needless damage to buildings, so Danny typically tried to steer altercations in that direction.

The lake in the middle was large enough to have an island – a misshapen lump of land with scraggly trees and far more weeds than grass. Sam met them on the banks, and Danny flew all three of them across the water to that little island. They could pretty much guarantee privacy here – the only people who really bothered to cross the lake were teenagers late at night who wanted to drink somewhere away from patrolling ghost hunters and police. Jack had been known to rope anybody he met into helping test his traps, and although nobody had ever been seriously hurt, there were enough incidents with glowing slime that people tended to stay away from places where the Fentons might turn up.

Unfamiliar scorch marks on the trees were also probably thanks to Valerie’s target practice – Danny had seen the Red Huntress hanging around here on quiet nights, shooting at trees and sometimes doing her homework by the illumination from her hoverboard’s headlights.

Danny placed his friends on the ground and kicked a few empty cans out of the way before sitting down. Sam and Tucker followed suit, exhaustion clear in their drawn faces and heavy sighs. Sam passed a coffee cup to Tucker. “Breakfast,” she said, pulling a packet of Tylenol from her pocket and popping two pills from their blisters. “Painkillers and caffeine.”

Tucker took them from her with a mumble of thanks, downing the tablets with a long swig from his drink. Danny couldn’t stop the amused thought that Jazz would have been mortified. Sam took a sip from her own travel mug before unzipping her backpack and tossing him a cola can. “You too,” she said. “You look like you’re fading away.”

Danny grunted and hooked a nail under the ring-pull, popping open the can. Muted green light shone through the small hole in a radioactive glow, an acidic scent sharp on the air, and Danny gratefully took a swig of the thick ectoplasm. It tasted a bit more metallic than when he drank it straight from his parents’ filters, probably because it had started to absorb the aluminium from its container, but phasing it into soda cans gave him the advantage of being able to drink it whenever he needed to.

The first sip was always the best, sweet and electric like a battery against his tongue, and his veins lit up like fire. Painkillers didn’t even hold a candle to this.

They sat there quietly for a moment, golden sunrise piercing through the shadows in bright beams around them. “So,” Sam said, questing in her bag again and pulling out a lump of papers and a textbook that was far too damaged to be hers, “your mum gave me your physics assignment that you left on your desk.”

Danny frowned, taking the pile from her and balancing it on his knees. Sam’s emotions didn’t give much away – her confusion and utter weariness chafed against his nerves. “What happened?” he asked.

Sam’s forehead crinkled. “That’s what I want to know,” she responded. She leaned forwards, placing and elbow on one knee and resting her chin in her hand. “When I went to your place your dad didn’t run to the door screaming about ghosts like he always does. Then your mum looked worse than you do, like she’s been crying, and when I said that we were supposed to do our assignment together this morning she said you’d forgotten it and gave me your stuff. She asked me to tell you to come home once you’ve handed in your assignment.”

Tucker shook his head, taking another long draught of his coffee. “That’s not proof they found out.”

Sam shrugged. “It’s more than we’ve ever had before,” she countered. “Since when does Mr Fenton not answer the door with a battle cry and a gun?”

“He could have been asleep,” Tucker tried.

She gave a sharp shake of her head. “He’s the one who answered.”

They were growing increasingly tense, their stress grinding against Danny’s and making him feel crankier. He closed his eyes and took another mouthful of ectoplasm, breathing deeply and waiting for it to settle his core. Accustomed to this, his friends waited in silence. After a handful of heartbeats he felt more grounded, opening his eyes and trying to ignore the hurt that burned within him. “I told you they found out,” he said. They both watched him, and he was acutely aware of the way the skin around their eyes sagged and how lines drew angles from the corners of their mouths.

His secret had taken such a toll on all three of them that he felt a tiny spark of relief at it finally nearing its end.

Their curiosity mingled with anxiety, and he made a concerted effort to draw back into himself. His emotions were raw enough without being swept up in theirs as well.

At the thoughts of the past hour, Danny didn’t even know where to start. He was still so confused himself, and the hurt that burned within him was suddenly identifiable – betrayal. His parents had lied to him in such a fundamental way, and it had shaped his every thought over the few years that had transpired since everything began with that portal.

The emotional pain threatened to choke him, and Danny took another swig of ectoplasm before trying to explain what happened. “I fell asleep at my desk doing this stupid assignment,” he said, gesturing to the papers on his knee like he could pin all of the blame on that. There was the irrational urge to shoot ectoblasts from his eyes to burn the paper to nothing – Tucker called it laser vision, despite Danny’s protests that it really was ectoplasm – but he knew that he was being irrational. It wasn’t his assignment’s fault, and it wasn’t really his fault either. “My mum woke me up at about four thirty so I could go to bed, and she went to get something out of my drawer and found the thermos there. Then…” he swallowed, throat suddenly catching as his body heated up. He forced back what felt like a sob, a stifled painful noise working its way out of him as he blinked back the tears that rushed from beneath his eyelids.

“Did she shoot at you?” Sam demanded as Danny struggled to find words again. “Are you hurt?”

Danny shook his head, breathing in short bursts through his nose. He took a shaky sip of his drink, grateful that they both sat and waited for him to continue. He pushed through the hurt, through the shock and sheer disbelief of what had happened. “She grabbed my hand,” he rasped. “She was cold, and… I could feel a core.” The words were strangled, and he had to force them out into the open. Saying them made everything far more real, and he couldn’t stop the tears from spilling over and dripping down his face.

“She’s overshadowed?” Tucker asked. His alarm was evident, and Danny could hear his friends’ heartbeats quicken at the thought. Maddie always had so many weapons on her person, so her being overshadowed was a terrifying notion.

Danny shook his head, feeling absolutely miserable. The can crunched in his grip, and he put it on the ground next to him before he could squeeze it badly enough to spill the remaining ectoplasm. “She didn’t feel like a ghost,” he said, “her core and heart were beating together. A ghost can’t fake that.”

Tucker frowned. “Is that supposed to mean something bad? Is she… dead?”

He forced the words through gritted teeth. “She’s a halfa.”

The silence lasted for several seconds, and then their shock melted into exasperation and disbelief. Danny felt even more hopeless as this brushed against his bitterness.

“Dude,” Tucker began, the lines around his eyes softening as pity rolled off him, “that’s not possible.”

“You were probably still half asleep,” Sam said. “It’s most likely just one of the regulars trying to ruin your life again. My bet’s on Spectra.”

Danny shook his head, trying to fight down the frustration that continued to build. “Why can’t you guys believe me?!” he snapped. Ice creaked through his veins, building in his face, and he knew that his eyes would be glowing by now. His freckles probably were as well, judging from how cold he felt. His tears froze on his cheeks in an instant, and everything rushed out of him as he began to shout. “She felt like Vlad and Dani! No other person has ever felt like that, no matter who overshadowed them! And then she admitted it, that she’s a… like me… and said that the Guys in White made her wear a limiter or something, but they took it off for a new system! And then Dad came in because we were shouting and did his typical guns blazing entry, and both of us made a ghost shield! And I’m so sick and tired of you guys not believing me when I tell you that something’s going on!”

Clenching his teeth, Danny forced himself to take a deep breath. He picked up his can again, drinking the rest in one go without looking at his friends. He didn’t need to see their faces anyway – the air buzzed with their shock at his outburst.

A sudden breeze flicked dead leaves across the ground, threatening to carry away the papers still balanced on his knee, and Danny sighed as he felt the pressure behind his eyes begin to settle. “Sorry,” he mumbled, dropping the empty can back onto the ground.

Sam picked the can up from where he had tossed it, crushing it the rest of the way and shoving it into a pocket of her backpack. “Okay,” she said, “so let’s see if we got that straight. Your mum woke you up, she found the thermos in your drawer, and then you felt her core when she touched you and your dad ran in when you started yelling and tried to shoot you both. Yeah?”

Danny nodded, fiddling with the corner of one of his pages. The paper began to wear under his touch, like fabric that frayed at the edges when you bent it too much. “Yeah,” he echoed.

Tucker rubbed his eyes behind his glasses. “So, does she know that you’re Phantom?”

Danny shrugged. “It wasn’t a great conversation,” he admitted. “She was asking about Phantom but I thought she was overshadowed, so she explained how she wasn’t. She realised that I’m a halfa at the same time and so I just started screaming at her because I was so… I’m just so… Y’know.” He shrugged again, biting on his lip as the pain swelled in his chest until every breath felt like someone was squeezing him from the inside out.

Tucker mirrored the shrug. “I’d be pissed too, man,” he said. “How long’s she been a halfa?”

“I don’t know,” Danny mumbled. “I just sort of yelled at her for all the hunting and stuff, and for never telling me, but Dad came in before we could actually talk. I never said that I was Phantom either, so I don’t know if it was clear enough for her to figure it all out.”

“And then you ran off,” Sam supplied.

“Would you have stayed with my dad pointing a gun at your head?” Danny snapped with a glare.

She rolled her eyes. “Scary Eyes me all you want, ghost boy, but I’m just trying to figure out what happened.”

“You’re not helping,” Danny grumbled.

“Stop picking fights with us,” she snapped back. “I’m sorry I didn’t believe you, okay? But we both got out of bed before five in the morning to help you with this even though we have an important assignment due in a couple of hours! So maybe be grateful for once!”

“Sam,” Tucker warned, “quit it.”

The only thing that was stopping Danny from flying away right now was the thought of how angry Sam would be if he left her there with no boat. He curled his fingers into fists, trying to keep his breathing level as the pain directed at his parents began to shift a little bit more towards his friends. His emotions were so _high_ right now, and a part of him recognised that it was his core amplifying everything. That small thought was enough to drag him back down from the brink of a full meltdown, and he passed Tucker his paperwork before standing up and beginning to pace.

The movement began to dispel the pent-up tension, and Danny breathed through his nose in sharp bursts. With every five paces he turned on his heel and went the other way, shafts of golden sunlight slicing through his vision and making it easier to clear his head. The others waited for him, knowing the cues by now.

After a minute or so he could think properly again. The anger that had clouded his thoughts was duller, and the hurt and confusion over what had happened no longer overwhelmed him. He knew what he had to do, and there was no way around it. A couple of frozen tears still clung to his cheeks and Danny wiped them on the back of his hand before turning to face his friends. “Sorry, guys,” he said, “my core’s a mess today.”

Tucker got to his feet as well, stretching with a groan. “We’re all tired.” He righted the ever-present beret before gulping down the rest of his coffee. “I don’t know about you guys, but I’m going home after we hand in that assignment.”

Sam frowned, standing up as well and hoisting her backpack onto her shoulder. “Won’t your mum ground you for skipping class?”

Tucker puffed out his chest. “I’m already grounded,” he said proudly. “She found an ectogun under my bed so now I’m stuck for the entire weekend.”

“At least she didn’t find the other four,” Sam snorted.

Tucker swung his own bag off the ground. “Nah, they’re all safe in here,” he said, patting the canvas.

Danny accepted his assignment back from Tucker, grateful that the tension had dissolved with the change in dynamic. “I’ll go home after handing this in as well,” he said. “No use delaying things.”

Their surprise was like a small wave on the shore – rolling forwards one moment, and then ebbing back into something gentler. Sam smiled at him, and he felt more reassured by that than anything else. “I’m proud of you,” she said.

Danny shrugged as the last touches of cold melted away with his stabilising emotions. “I still have no clue what to say, but I don’t think they’ll hurt me.”

Tucker huffed. “If your mum’s really a halfa, I don’t think you’re in danger. Now let’s go – if we’re finishing these assignments before school starts then I’m gunna need another coffee.”

Danny passed Sam his physics work and wrapped and arm around each of his friends’ waists. He tilted into weightlessness, lifting all three of them into the air, and felt the clouds clear from his thoughts.

They were right – he just needed to sort everything out without overreacting. He was just as guilty of the secrets as his parents were, so maybe all they had to do was sit down as a family and actually tell the truth for once. First he’d hand in this stupid assignment, and then he’d head home and sort it all out. The thought of finally escaping from all of those tangled lies was incredibly freeing, and as they rose into the air, Danny couldn’t stop himself from smiling.

Things were going to be fine.


	5. Tessellation

The lab was an absolute mess. Every single weapon of their entire inventing career had been spewed from the depths of drawers and the backs of cabinets, with power cords and battery packs tangled together in an intestinal heap. Most of the guns hadn’t held their charge during storage, and their plastic casings made them look like cheap toys when they didn’t light up along the sides.

Years of work lay in piles on the floor and the sight of it combined with her fatigue and threatened to overwhelm her.

Maddie stooped down and picked a pistol out of one of the mounds. Small and fairly nondescript, it was perfectly weighted and fit beautifully to the contours of her hand. Blue lights ignited along its black casing at her touch, and Maddie sighed as homesickness pressed at the space beneath her ribs.

“That thing still works?” Jack asked with a spark of wonder, dumping another armful of cables on the designated heap.

His curiosity pricked at her and Maddie nodded, pressing the gun into his outstretched hand. As soon as it lost contact with her the lights faded out, leaving the weapon as lifeless as the ones sorted into various piles on the floor. Jack took aim at a target across the lab and pulled the trigger but the gun was a useless as a child’s toy.

Maddie straightened up and reclaimed the weapon from him. It lit up again immediately and her skin buzzed through her glove where it touched the plastic. She set her sights on the same target, a cardboard cut-out of a green blob that had been painted with ectoplasm, and squeezed the trigger. The gun fired in a steady beam of light, burning a hole straight through the cardboard ghost and dissipating harmlessly on the stainless steel wall behind it.

Jack chuckled. “Good old Ghost Zone technology,” he said, clapping a hand on his wife’s shoulder before heading back towards the drawers of old weapons. “One day I’ll make something like that.”

Maddie smiled and fished the pistol’s holster out of the pile, clipping it to her empty utility belt. She slid the gun into its place, the weight on her hip feeling so much more _right_ than anything that she had ever built in this lab.

Her headache was still there from earlier, throbbing with increased intensity after that rush of activity, and Maddie pulled back her goggles and hood so she could rub her eyes. “I need to lie down,” she said. 

Jack didn’t turn around to look at her, opting instead to wave his hand above where his head was buried in a cabinet. “I’ll be up for some fudge once I finish this drawer,” he responded, voice muffled. “Do you want me to make you anything?”

Maddie was already on the stairs. “No, I’m just tired,” she called back.

As soon as she opened the thick iron door at the top of the stairs an exhaustion that was not her own brushed across her thoughts. Maddie followed the source, stepping into the kitchen to find her son sitting at the table.

Danny deposited his spoon into a half-empty bowl of cereal. He leaned back in his chair, just looking at her for a long moment, and Maddie’s shoulders dropped in relief when there was none of the anger from the night before. Danny just felt tired, with something tender and sharp underlying the waves of exhaustion.

“I handed in my assignment,” he said when she didn’t move.

“That’s good.” She could sense a nervous anxiety creeping through him, and pushed herself to go and turn on the coffee machine. She didn’t need the coffee, she needed _sleep_ , but she figured that this conversation would be more comfortable if it was casual. The last thing she wanted was for him to feel interrogated. While the machine did its work, she pulled some painkillers out of the high cupboard where they kept everyday medicine and swallowed them dry. Ectoplasm worked better, but she wouldn’t rush to adapt herself around Danny yet. It was unclear what would be too much right now so she decided to do things on his terms.

Danny stayed quiet, his spoon clinking against the bowl as he resumed eating. His stress was beginning to swell, and she tried to buffer it by thinking of calming things. The thought of flying with her son was more than enough to settle her mind, and Danny’s anxiety palpably softened in response to her mood.

She’d missed being able to communicate like this.

Coffee drizzled into her mug and Maddie made a satisfied sound as the machine clicked off. She took the drink over to the table, sitting so that she was at right angles to her son.

Danny spooned the last couple of mouthfuls in silence before pushing back his bowl and twisting his chair to face her a bit more. His uncertainty was like static in the room. “So,” he began, meeting her eyes for a moment before dropping his gaze to her coffee mug instead, “sorry for yelling.”

Out of all the things he could have said, he was apologising. His face was gaunt, as though somebody had carved sharp angles along his cheekbones and chipped away at the spaces around his eyes. Maddie wondered how she had missed it.

He responded to her guilt with more of that emotion that had been there since she had entered the room. A deep ache rested beneath his fatigue. When it touched her, Maddie felt the weight of something so monumental that she had to pull herself back.

There was a pause then, and neither one looked up.

“Secrets are heavy,” Danny offered, the words fizzing against her senses with a tinge of bitterness. “I should have just told you when it happened.”

Maddie shook her head. She didn’t know what to say, but Danny sat quietly in his seat and didn’t offer any further information. She focused on trying to decipher his aching soul – the pain that she could feel from him throbbed steadily, like a toothache that just wouldn’t leave.

“I’m sorry that I didn’t tell you,” she said, trying to feel her way.

He looked at her then, mouth tight as his eyebrows drew themselves together. “Why didn’t you?”

She gave a heavy sigh. “The Guys in White have been monitoring me ever since I left the Ghost Zone. When I had Jazz and then you, the agreement was that they wouldn’t touch you if you didn’t know about this. Immature cores can be crippled by injuries and I wasn’t going to let that happen to you.”

His frown grew deeper and a curious sort of confusion rose from him. “You’re from the Ghost Zone?” He had curled his hands over his knees, leaning forward as though caught in her orbit. “But there’s nothing there except creepy lairs and floating rocks.”

Maddie sighed again. She wasn’t really that surprised that he had gone through the portal before, but his lack of enthusiasm was something that they would need to overcome. “Yes,” she said, resisting the urge to fold her arms across her chest. “There are places where clans of halfas live.”

His shock punched her with its sheer intensity. Danny was wide-eyed with his mouth open as his shoulders and hands went limp. “What?” he whispered. Something else filtered through the shock, an overwhelming _relief_ that made Maddie wonder exactly what her son had been through. A couple of tears slipped down his cheeks, and Danny wiped them away with a shaky breath. “There… There are _more_ of us?” She nodded and he took another breath that shuddered with his shifting world. “Why have I never found any?”

“You have to know where to look,” she answered. Guilt pressed against her lungs at the sheer loneliness he must have felt and Danny responded by reaching out to place his hand on her arm. The material of her HAZMAT suit blocked most of the energy from crossing between them but she still felt a faint tingle of cold at the contact.

“I’m okay,” he reassured her, squeezing her arm before pulling back again. His emotions supported the statement – a lot of the weight from moments before had lifted away. He was still tired and a bit confused, but there was a peace there that hadn’t been present before.

Maddie nodded before finally reaching for her cup of coffee. She took a sip, waiting for Danny to speak as she felt his curiosity peak again.

“So is Jazz a halfa?” he asked, scrunching his forehead. “Or Dad? Have I just been living in a house full of ghosts without realising it?”

Maddie snorted at the thought. “No, your dad’s human,” she said. “Jazz is as well.”

His frown grew deeper. “But you’re a halfa.”

She waved her hand in a noncommittal gesture. “Do you remember studying genetics in biology class last year?”

“Not really,” Danny grunted and ducked his head as sudden embarrassment rolled of him. “I was too busy protecting the town from ghosts.”

So he was definitely Phantom then.

Right. They would have to talk about that in a minute. One thing at a time. “Well, people inherit things from their parents, like eye colour or the shape of their earlobes. You can have dominant genes or recessive, and everybody has two genes for each trait they inherit. With eyes, for example, brown is dominant and blue is recessive, so if a person gets blue eyes they have two blue genes, but a person with brown eyes will either have two brown genes or a blue and a brown since the brown is dominant and overpowers the blue.”

Danny’s confusion cleared in a ray of realisation. “So Dad gave us human genes, and you gave me a dominant halfa gene and Jazz got a whatever-it-is human gene?”

Maddie smiled in pride. “Yes,” she said. “You were born with your core, but it stayed dormant because you were never exposed to enough ectoplasm to activate it.”

She was sure that he felt her curiosity, but was unprepared for the anxiety that crept back into his emotional output. “Yeah, about that,” he said, giving a nervous little laugh. He reached up to rub the back of his neck, radiating awkwardness. “I sorta might’ve been inside the portal when it first turned on.”

It was her turn to be shocked. Maddie felt like somebody had dropped her in the snow – her brain emptied of all thought, the coffee cup tilting wildly in her hand and almost spilling its contents. She tried to form a coherent sentence as Danny’s nervousness beat against her in waves of increasing intensity. Two thoughts wormed their way to the surface, vying for her attention. How had he kept this a secret for so long? But, with everything that they knew about Phantom, she had expected it to somehow be longer. “Your core’s only been activated for three years?” she rasped. “With the level of power we’ve seen you use?!”

“Ah, yeah, I was wondering when you were gunna figure it out,” he mumbled and looked down at the floor. “I guess that answers your question about me knowing Phantom.”

Maddie slammed her cup back onto the table, reaching for her son and grasping his upper arms. A spike of fear shot through him at her urgency and he squirmed at her touch. “Mum?”

She tried to calm her panic as he responded with waves of uncertainty. “Let me feel your core,” she insisted. “Morph, please.”

He crinkled his nose and wormed his way out of her grasp. “You mean change my form?” Amusement sprinkled the air in a fine mist. “I call it ‘going ghost’.”

The joke did the trick – Maddie’s tension loosened just a bit. “You’re not serious.”

Danny smirked at her, but the expression was lost in the undertone of his simmering stress. “Dead serious,” he said. He put on an air of bravado and stood up, puffing out his chest with his hands on his hips and a serious expression. “I’m going ghost!” he announced in a ridiculously deep voice.

Light wrapped around him and swept away the son she knew, leaving the town’s most infamous ghost in its wake. He floated there, seemingly unsure of what to do with his hands as he folded and unfolded his arms before rubbing his neck again. His eyes were simmering wells of green energy as he peered at her through white bangs that glowed with the shifting light of embers. “Uh, ta da?”

Maddie smiled, trying to ease him down by settling her own emotions. She was sure that she had nothing to worry about. Nudging the cold that tugged at her own chest, Maddie sighed as white rings snapped into place around her waist. They slipped over her body and melted away the form that she had become so accustomed to wearing.

The two of them hovered together and Danny stared at her in open surprise. “Mum,” he breathed, reaching out a gloved hand to place it on her arm, “you look like _me_.”

Maddie grinned, “Actually, _you’re_ the one who looks like _me_.”

Danny gave a broken laugh, pulling his arm back to run a hand through his hair. It sparked at his touch, like lightning in the clouds, throwing his face into unfamiliar shadows. Now that she saw him up close it was obvious that this was _Danny_ , but Maddie had to admit that from further away the glow would make it difficult to recognise him.

“You’re not wearing HAZMAT,” he observed.

Maddie shrugged at the comment. She was dressed plainly – a black shirt, black pants, and black boots that buckled up to her knees. “This is pretty typical for halfas,” she explained. “If you’re going to fight or train, it’s usually as a ghost, and this is what people from my clan like to wear.”

“It’s not the outfit you died in?”

Maddie’s gaze snapped to his face at that comment. “You didn’t die,” she said, struggling to keep herself calm and her voice level. He really knew nothing and it was difficult for her to not blame herself.

Danny’s discomfort at her sudden swollen stress brushed at the edges of her senses, and Maddie drew herself back to the immediate issue. There was so much to deal with here that it could easily overwhelm both of them, so she really needed to take control of the situation and steer it carefully from one step to the next.

Danny didn’t seem to know what to say, and Maddie took the opportunity to float closer to him. She tried to ignore the fact that she was flying – _actually flying!_ – after so long on the ground, and with her son no less! She placed a hand on his shoulder, and Danny reached up to cover it with his own. “I didn’t die?” he breathed, seeming far too young as he stared at her with that radioactive gaze.

Maddie shook her head. “No, of course not,” she reassured him. “You activated your core and it kept you from dying. But you’re really powerful for your core’s age so I need to check it to make sure that everything’s stable.”

He frowned, nose crinkling beneath a dusting of green freckles. There was still uncertainty there, thrumming steadily from her son like a rapid heartbeat. “All this time,” he murmured, the words trailing off as he met her gaze. Maddie tried her best to soothe his stress, coaxing her own thoughts into stillness in the hope that he would react to her calmer output. It didn’t take long – like the sky clearing after a storm, Danny’s anxiety trickled past them to be replaced by warm swells of peace.

They stayed like that for a long moment, emotions lapping against each other as they both gathered their thoughts. Maddie tried not to wonder what her son had been going through – it would just stress her out, and right now she needed to be calm so that last night wasn’t repeated.

Danny seemed to echo her thoughts. “I’m glad I’m not dead,” he said, the corners of his mouth curving upwards. That little smile smoothed out some of the exhaustion in his expression, and Danny suddenly looked more at ease than he had so far. “I guess me have a lot to talk about, but there’s a lot, and I don’t know where to start.”

Maddie squeezed his shoulder. “Just let me check your core, and then we can all have a rest before we talk about it.”

Danny nodded. “I barely slept last night,” he confessed. “I think that last time I looked at the clock was three thirty.”

“I didn’t get any sleep,” Maddie responded, keeping her voice light and a smile on her face. This was the problem with being a halfa – you really couldn’t lie to each other. Stress stirred within her at the thought of everything her son’s secret could contain but she masked it by focusing on the exhaustion that weighed her down.

Danny yawned in response to the fatigue that she broadcasted. “So how do you look at my core?”

Maddie floated closer to him and rested both hands on his shoulders. “Stay still,” she instructed and turned her hands intangible. They passed through his body like it wasn’t even there and Maddie chewed on her lower lip, frowning as she concentrated on finding the buzz of energy that indicated that her hands were in the place where his core was sitting. After a moment she found it, nestled in its rightful place behind his other internal organs. It was a physical organ itself, a rope-like structure thin enough to wrap one hand around and running from the height of his shoulder blades all the way down to his hips. Maddie channelled energy into her hands, enabling her to curl her fingers around his core without turning tangible and damaging the rest of his insides.

Danny made a curious whining sound, his breathing sharp as he tensed in her grasp. Discomfort rolled off him and he tried to pull away from her. The movement tugged at Maddie’s hands but she held fast and Danny whined again, screwing his eyes shut and clasping her biceps.

“That hurts,” he gasped, face twisting as he tried to push her arms away.

“Stop moving,” Maddie insisted. “This’ll be faster if you stay still.”

Danny nodded without opening his eyes, and Maddie gently ran her hands up and down the length of his core. The surface was smooth and cold and it slipped through her fingers like silk, devoid of injuries or scars. Maddie’s frown deepened at the sensation of some sections exhibiting more ambient power than others. She started from the top and slid her hands slowly down while Danny’s muscles tremored. Her son’s core was a mosaic of power levels, some parts overflowing with energy while others were so faint that she could barely feel them. She tested a section, sending gentle pulses of power through the core and feeling the way that it responded.

Danny yelped, digging his fingers into her arms and trying to tug backwards again. Maddie let go and allowed him to pull away so that they were floating a couple of paces apart.

“What the hell was that?” he panted, curling in on himself in mid-air and wrapping his arms around his waist. Danny’s legs had morphed into a spectral tail and it shifted as though drawing itself towards his chest.

“You’re not hurt,” Maddie said. “It’s not pleasant to have your core examined but you’ll feel better in a moment.”

Danny grunted, moving to massage his abdomen. “I feel like you just stirred up my insides. How often do you have to do that to me?”

“Every few months until your core’s mature.”

“Great,” he grumbled, uncurling enough to drop into his chair. “So what was that actually for?”

Maddie sat down as well, reclaiming her cup of coffee and taking a long draught. It was now only lukewarm, and she sighed.

Danny tensed at her dissatisfaction and Maddie lifted her mug towards him slightly. “Coffee’s cold,” she clarified. “Your core’s nothing to worry about. You have some parts that are good and strong from all the fighting you do, but there are also a lot of powers that are either only partially developed or not available yet.”

He nodded. “Yeah, I get a new power every now and then, or an old one sort of upgrades.”

“We’ll test you more later,” she responded. “You really should be training with me so we can make sure that each power develops properly and you don’t neglect anything.”

Danny yawned. “How much more developing do I hafta do?”

Maddie stood up, heading towards the sink with the half-full mug. “Cores typically mature after ten years,” she informed him, “so you’ve got about seven left.” She tipped her drink down the drain and cleaned the mug before placing it on the side. Danny’s emotions were fairly flat – nothing was discernible beyond his exhaustion. Maddie turned towards him again. “Come on, let’s both go lie down for a bit and then we can all talk some more this afternoon.”

Danny yawned, using the table to lever himself to his feet. “Solid plan,” he mumbled.

Footsteps rattled on the lab’s metal stairs and the yellow biohazard door flew open and crashed into the wall behind it with a bang that startled Maddie’s sluggish thoughts into high alert. Danny had practically leapt into the air at the sound, and he hovered close beside her with his hands up in readiness for whatever attack might be coming.

Jack bounded through the door, arms wrapped around an assortment of blasters that threatened to slip out of his grasp with every movement. He stopped when he saw the two halfas, and Maddie barely registered his surprise before he gave one of those brilliant grins that lit up her view like the rising sun. “Dann-o!” he bellowed, dropping the weapons on the floor and striding towards them. “Looks like you’re a true Fenton ghost hunter after all!”

A snort sounded from the teen floating next to her, and Maddie shoved her elbow into his ribs in a playful gesture. The initial surprise at Jack’s loud entrance had given away to amusement for both of them and Danny dropped back onto the floor. As soon as his boots touched the scuffed linoleum Jack swept him into a hug, lifting Danny back off the floor in his enthusiasm. The large man’s guilt flushed through the room like a bad smell, and Maddie could feel Danny’s awkward stress seep back.

“Dad,” he groaned, “I’m okay.”

Jack gave him an extra tight squeeze before allowing him to slip out of his arms. Danny stood between the two adults, his breathing tense as that same helpless uncertainty bled through the air. “It’s fine,” he said before either of them could get a word in. “The portal activated my core, you guys never hurt me that much with your hunting, and everything’s okay now.” His exhaustion bloomed, and he visibly swayed on his feet.

Maddie got the feeling that he was far too tired to go over everything right then, and she sent her husband a glance over Danny’s head. “We were both just heading upstairs for a rest,” she said once Jack met her eyes. “We were going to talk more later.”

Jack nodded. “When you two wake up I should be ready to take your ectosignatures so we can make sure our weapons can’t hurt either of you.”

Danny’s relief swelled against her, and Maddie placed a steadying hand on his shoulder. “That sounds great,” she said. “Message those agents as well so they can come and get Danny’s ectosignature for that gun.” She glanced at the clock on the wall above the sink – it was almost midday already. “Tell them to come after dinner.”

“Sure,” Jack said, stepping to one side so that they could access the door. “Is there any fudge?”

Maddie smiled at her husband as Danny chuckled. “Of course,” she said, tightening her grip on her son’s shoulder and steering him towards to doorway. “Wake me up by five.”

“Mhm,” Jack grunted, pulling open the fridge door and bending over to hunt inside. “See you later.”

Danny slipped out of her grasp, skirting the pile of ectoguns and beginning to climb the stairs. “I’ll see you at dinner,” he murmured before climbing ahead of her, a lingering sense of relief trailing behind him.

Yawning, Maddie followed him up the stairs. Sleep tugged at her mind, beckoning her to bed, and she ignored thoughts that grew slower with every step. She’d deal with the Guys in White in a few hours, and then maybe after all these years she’d finally be able to float with her son among the clouds.


	6. Tempest

Over the course of the afternoon a storm had swelled from the horizon, sending towering clouds in huge swathes of grey steadily scrolling across the sky until they blocked out all blue. The static energy rolling with the wind found its way beneath doors and through the slivers of space between windows and their frames, leaving an acidic tinge in the back of Danny’s throat with every breath. It was going to be a big one. The sight of the clouds evoked an ache that penetrated down to his bones, his core thrumming with a clear resonance at the sheer power that rolled from above. It wasn’t a snowstorm – it was still a bit too early for those – but Danny’s soul sang at the thought of lifting himself free of the earth’s gravitational pull to rise into the grey mass.

He refocused his gaze and scowled at the reflection of glowing green eyes in his windowpane. It was difficult to rein himself in again, trying to force his core to settle despite the energy that throbbed through the air with every fresh gust of wind. As soon as his reflection stopped glowing he pulled his curtains closed, tearing away from the view and forcing himself to walk out of his bedroom.

The house shuddered as it was hammered by waves of wind, and Danny paused halfway down the stairs as he tried to gather his thoughts. He could feel his parents in the kitchen, and their emotions were wound with the tightness of tension. Each person felt a bit different – his father’s emotions usually fizzed like a soda can after it had been shaken, or like orange sherbet on your tongue. His mother was more muted, probably deliberately restrained if she had been a halfa for as long as she implied, and the soft edges of her thoughts were gently falling snow or the moon rising on clear winter nights.

He wondered what his own emotions felt like, and then Danny noticed the shift in his mother’s perception. She had recognised him on the stairs and pressed against his mind inquisitively. He sighed as the house shuddered again and walked the rest of the way down, stopping in the kitchen doorway and leaning against the doorframe with his arms folded across his chest. He knew that his mother could sense his amusement but Jack remained oblivious, his back to the door as he brandished a screwdriver at what looked like a glowing blood pressure cuff. Cords connected the device to a laptop on the table, its screen lit up with a distinctive shade of blue that always sent Tucker into a nervous panic.

“This computer’s possessed!” Jack bellowed, slamming the screwdriver down and beginning to type furiously. The monitor didn’t change, smugly displaying its error message with the sad little frowning emoticon. “Those damned ghosts! First they steal my fudge, then they destroy my computer!”

Maddie smirked at Danny over his father’s head and Danny grinned back at her. His father always ate all the fudge in the middle of the night and then would forget about it the next day and blame ghosts for the loss. It had become a bit of a running joke in the Fenton household and whenever something went missing everyone would blame it on the ghosts. Jack never noticed their sarcasm.

“Blue screen of death?” he asked casually, smile widening as Jack whirled to face him. “Tucker got grounded so he can’t fix it until Monday.”

Jack’s surprise at Danny’s appearance ebbed away, disappointment bleeding through in its wake. “It’s to get your ectosignature though. I can’t fix the weapons until this works!”

Danny shrugged, pushing himself off the doorframe and reaching around his father. He pulled out the USB connecting the blood pressure cuff and held down the laptop’s power button. “Maybe it just needs a restart,” he suggested as the screen went black. “I think Tuck made sure that there was a startup repair installed so we can try that first.”

Jack took a step back to allow Danny full access to the computer. It was quiet in the room and Danny took a moment to try to gauge what his parents were feeling. Jack was an easy read, expressing frustration that Danny presumed was aimed at the computer mingled with anxiety that Danny thought might be directed towards him. Maddie proved a bit more difficult to decipher – something was unsettled about her, but it was muffled by a calm overlay. Danny wondered if it was possible to manipulate what emotions others could sense from you.

The fan whirred as the machine came back to life and Danny mashed his finger against the F8 key. Nobody spoke as the screen changed again, and he made a pleased sound as he selected the option to repair the computer. “Told you,” he said, stepping back as the computer began to do its thing. “Give it a few minutes, hopefully this’ll fix it.”

Wind slammed against the house again and the beams creaked inside the walls.

“Right,” Jack said with a decisive nod. “Let’s have fudge for dinner.”

The comment was accompanied by a tidal wave of Jack’s uncertainty, making Danny cringe as it sent his core reeling. “Uh, maybe pizza would be better?” he suggested. His voice was weaker than he would have liked and he was grateful when his mother wrapped him in her more stable sense of calm. It was almost meditative and he turned to look at her with a raised eyebrow.

“Pizza sounds great,” she responded, amusement streaking between them like a ray of light. “It’s Friday anyway so I’m not cooking.”

“Well every time we have fudge it disappears, so I’m sure that _ghosts_ are stealing it! I’ll have to make it with blood blossoms next time. Now, to the telephone!” Jack cried, stampeding out of the room.

The emotional whirlwind that they had been caught in settled softly like swirling motes of dust.

“He’s trying,” Maddie said.

Danny tried to push away his feeling of relief – the conversation would have to be had sooner or later and all they were accomplishing by this strange avoidance was postponing the inevitable. “I know.”

She sighed and sat in the same chair that Danny had been using only a few hours ago. It creaked as she settled into it and wind whistled through the tiny gaps around the kitchen window frame. She looked almost unfamiliar as she ran a hand through unkempt hair, and was still wearing the creased pyjamas from her nap instead of her typical blue HAZMAT. The lack of black around her face made her seem younger. He got the irrational feeling that their roles were now reversed but chalked it down to the different dynamic of the room. “I called Jazz,” he told her, trying to shake off the thought that they had already started a conversation like this today.

She didn’t look at him, but Danny got the feeling that she was waiting for him to say something else. He sent out a shot of confusion and her peaceful thoughts stirred to release the apprehension that dwelt beneath.

“She figured me out years ago,” he said, probing for some sort of response. “I told her what happened last night.”

Her guilt was back again, weighing down the air between them. “What does she think?”

Danny braced his hands against the table. “She’s fine with the whole halfa thing, I think she always has been ever since she figured me out, but we’re both still confused about why you didn’t tell us _something_. We’ve been in the Ghost Zone before, we both get attacked regularly, and your weapons malfunction around us all the time. You could have at least told us how to defend ourselves.”

Maddie sighed again, and he watched as she ran her hand over a whorl in the grain of the table. “I told you before. If we told you anything that could help you learn the truth then we would lose you. We didn’t know when those agents could be watching us.” She finally looked up at him, distress simmering alongside her guilt. “We tried to teach you both how to use defensive tech and told you to stay away from things that might be dangerous but neither of you ever wanted to learn.”

Danny tried his best to stay calm but he knew that she could feel his frustration. The computer whirred happily, lighting up with the lock screen, and he had the nasty thought that the little machine had been easy to fix in comparison to this mess. “If you were worried about the agents overhearing then you could have told us on one of our camping trips,” he snapped, “or when Dad used to take me fishing, or when we were at Vlad’s place. You could have whispered it to me one night or sent me a coded message or pretended to get lost together in the Ghost Zone…” he trailed off, knowing how ridiculous he sounded but unable to hide the tears that burned across his lashline. “Why didn’t you tell me?” he rasped, voice tight with held-back tears. “Didn’t you know I was hurting?”

Maddie’s guilt expanded with every word. “Sweetie, I’m sorry, but it was too risky. If we’d known…” she faltered, brushing her fingers against her own eyes as they shone with extra moisture. “If we’d known that you were in that portal, we _never_ would have kept it from you.”

“You seriously think it was the right thing to do?” he demanded, deliberately ignoring the tears that began to run down his face. “Don’t you think we deserved to know?”

Danny didn’t know why he kept pushing like this but desperation hammered in his heartbeat. All of the pain, all of the fear and the secrets – everything could have been avoided if his parents had just been honest from the start.

Maddie’s guilt continued to build, saturating the air like dense clouds of smoke. She said nothing.

“You could have at least told us that not all ghosts are evil,” he insisted, and the words tugged at that sharp pain inside him.

Maddie’s pain met his with equal intensity. “We needed to keep you safe,” she finally said, the words wrenching at his thoughts. “You and Jazz weren’t interested in learning how to defend yourselves, even when you were young, so we decided to tell you anything we could to keep you out of danger. Most ghosts that come through portals are malevolent so it was too much of a risk.”

Her words made an awful kind of sense but logic couldn’t seem to push past his emotions right now. The room felt too small, the neckline of his shirt too tight, and his breath was loud in his own ears as an arctic chill swept through every vein. Danny didn’t want to lose control but his body reacted to his frustration before he could rein in his core. He briefly wondered if this was what obsessions felt like but then the thought was lost as his core took over. “I hated myself!” he screamed, clenching his fists. He knew that his eyes were glowing – the aura tinted his peripheral vision – but now that he had started, the hurt all welled to the surface and clawed its way up his throat. “I thought I was some kind of, of _freak_ who would never belong anywhere, and, and you were always shooting at me, and when I finally met Vlad h-he was an absolute _jerk_ and I thought he was the only other one like me and I was so _lonely_ and _scared!_ ”

No words could articulate his pain and so he dumped that there as well, letting it all go so that his mother would be able to feel every nuance of what he had been through. His tears had frozen on his cheeks again and new ones followed their paths – they froze on the top to create thicker and thicker layers of ice on his face.

It was freeing to finally unload everything that he had carried for so long, and Danny simply stood there as his breathing rasped against the silent weight of the emotions in the room.

Dawning horror pressed against his nerves as Maddie’s shock faded and tears began to slip down her own cheeks. She got to her feet, but Danny stayed stiff and unresponsive as she gently wrapped her arms around him. She was soft and familiar and his soul cried out for the gentle comfort that she could provide but he held himself aloof. Some part of him screamed that he needed her to understand what she’d done to him, and as Maddie stroked his hair he felt the energy of her core through her skin.

The contact heightened their awareness of each other, and her regret penetrated his flesh and flushed through his veins. It was something that Danny had never experienced before and this new way of sharing emotions was confronting, but when his brain told his body to pull away his core took charge instead and he melted into his mother’s embrace with a sob. He felt her emotions as if they were his own, guilt and regret knotted together with overwhelming sorrow, and some part of him realised that if he was feeling his mother’s emotions then she was probably feeling his as well. This was something that words could never even begin to express – an intimate understanding of the person that explained every facet of their emotions. You could talk for weeks on end but still never know somebody as well as Danny knew his mother in this moment. He could feel the rush of their heartbeats, the steady hum of their cores, the hollow, empty bellows of air in their lungs, and he buried his face in her shoulder and cried.

An uncertainty that belonged to neither of them came from the doorway and nudged against Danny’s awareness, and a moment later a large pair of arms folded around the two halfas. Jack didn’t say anything, his warm weight reassuring at Danny’s back. Danny continued to cry, and thick emotions poured out of him with every heaving breath. Frozen tears cracked off his skin in little sheets of ice, sticking to the soft fabric of Maddie’s pyjamas. He clutched at his mother’s shirt with tight fists and simply allowed himself to be _held_ for the first time he could really remember since he had turned on that portal.

Time slipped by. By the time the doorbell rang Danny felt like a heavy rain had washed him out. “That’ll be the pizza,” Jack said, rubbing a hand through Danny’s hair before pulling away.

“Make sure you tip him extra for delivering in that gale outside,” Maddie reminded him.

Jack made an affirmative noise and Danny felt his emotions grow fainter as he moved out of the room. A moment later they heard voices at the door, and wind whistled through the house from this new access point.

“Come on,” Maddie coaxed, and Danny allowed himself to be guided to a chair. She helped him into it and he slumped over the table, folding his arms against the scarred wood and resting his head on them. He had a headache again thanks to all that crying, and a curious emptiness left behind after his mother stopped sharing their emotions through touch. He could still read the room but it was nowhere near as intense as the skin-to-skin contact had been.

“Does it always feel like that when you touch another halfa?” he mumbled, pressing stinging eyes into his forearm. The pressure sent tiny bursts of light across the darkness of his closed lids and it made him feel a little better. Human or not, this had always been the same.

Maddie hummed and he could feel her moving around him. The laptop closed with a small click, papers shuffling as she shifted and he realised that she was clearing the table. “Not really,” she said. “It’s only when you’re both broadcasting at an intense level. I guess you never tried it with Vlad?”

Danny snorted, regretting the action as his head throbbed. “He’s a fruitloop,” he said by way of explanation. He knew that his frustration bloomed at the mere mention of Vlad’s name, and Maddie’s amusement cut through the lingering heavy emotions like a knife. Not everything had been fixed yet but after what they had just shared the energy between them had grown lighter.

“He’s always been… difficult,” she suggested.

“What’s his problem anyway?” Danny grumbled.

“Who’s problem?” Jack asked, the familiar scent of pizza wafting into the room along with him. “Is it a ghost?!”

“Just Vlad,” Maddie said, and Danny felt the boxes being placed just in front of where his head and arms still rested on the table. “Would you be a dear and go get some ectoplasm from the lab for Danny’s headache?”

Jack left again, and Danny struggled to figure out what he wanted to talk about first. “I have so many questions,” he mumbled, “about _so_ many things.”

His mother’s hand gently carded through his hair and Danny relaxed at her touch. The contact still throbbed with energy and a deep sudden _awareness_ of her core that matched his ghost sense, but nothing like their embrace had been. “One step at a time,” she reminded him.

Danny huffed, lifting his head from his forearms as his father’s footsteps hammered up the lab’s stairs. Wind cracked against the house again and his core jumped in response to the rush of energy but a soft thought from his mother tied him down. “How do you do that?” he asked.

“Think about calming things,” she suggested. “Controlling your core comes with time.”

He grunted and sat up properly as Jack burst back into the room. “Got it!” the man bellowed, slamming a glass bottle down in front of Danny.

There was a sudden silence weighted by apprehension from both of his parents, and Danny realised that they weren’t sure what he was comfortable with. The prospect of dissecting every little aspect of his life was exhausting so before either of them could try to explain why they had just given him a bottle filled with glowing green slime he unscrewed the cap and took a long draught. The ectoplasm was thick and viscous with a texture somewhere between honey and ice-cream, its energy familiar on his tongue in a way that made his core ache. The pain in his head was swept away like old cobwebs during a spring clean.

Jack made a little strangled sound while his surprise crept like a sudden spreading stain, and Danny smiled at him. “It’s like water, isn’t it? Just like my body needs me to drink water all the time, my core needs ectoplasm.”

He already knew the answer, but the way Jack’s face slackened at the relief of being included was worth asking.

“Yeah,” he father managed. “Halfas need ectoplasm to survive. In fact, I’ve decided to invent a new device that’ll-”

“Yes, dear,” Maddie interrupted, catching her son’s eye and winking. “But the pizzas are getting cold so let’s start eating.”

Jack grumbled good-naturedly and heaved himself into a chair. It creaked in protest, and Danny took another long drink of ectoplasm as his mother took a seat as well. “I got all our favourites!” Jack announced, spreading the three boxes out from where they were stacked and opening each lid. Danny snagged the garlic bread first, unwrapping its foil packaging and pulling it into thirds before his father could devour the whole thing. It was still hot enough that he had to blow on his fingers, and the simple familiarity of pizza night on Fridays went a long way toward steadying him.

He grabbed a slice of the New York pepperoni, taking several bites while he tried to figure out what to say first. The brief conversation over the past five minutes had stirred his curiosity and he glanced at his mother. “So, what’s the deal with Vlad?”

Maddie sighed, taking a sip from a second bottle of ectoplasm that Jack had given her while Danny had been distracted. “Vlad’s always been an issue,” she said. “It’s complicated.”

“I don’t get it.” Danny pulled at a string of cheese that hung off the edge of his slice. “Ever since we found about each other he’s gone on and on about how he wants to kill dad and marry you, and he wants me as his son etcetera etcetera, but he’s never said anything about you being a halfa or about other halfas existing. I thought he thought we were alone as well.”

Maddie frowned, irritation buzzing like a mosquito around the table. “Halfas don’t usually leave the Ghost Zone,” she explained, “but it’s happened at a slow trickle for as long as ghost portals have existed. It’s entirely possible for two halfa parents to have a human child, sort of like Jazz, and so there’s always been an option for those human children to move into this world if they choose to as they get older. It’s only since the Guys in White were formed that the portals were shut down or regulated. In the past when the humans would leave the Ghost Zone, halfas would sometimes choose to come with them. It’s been happening for so long that there are estimated to be millions of people on the earth who have unactivated cores without knowing about it. It’s just incredibly rare for anything to happen since most people don’t go around playing with ectoplasm or ghost portals.”

Danny felt like his world was reeling. “So Vlad left the Ghost Zone?” he asked. “Or was he one of those people born in this world who didn’t know he had a core?”

“He was born in Wisconsin,” Jack supplied. “Nobody knew he had a core until it was activated at college.”

“The proto-portal,” Danny murmured.

Maddie nodded. “I was already being monitored by the Guys in White so your father and I weren’t allowed to say anything about it, and Vlad was never told about other halfas.”

His parents’ regret was sour, and Danny took another bite of pizza in an effort to not be weighed down again. There was so much information here and he needed to go slowly if he wanted them to unpack everything for him. “So is that why he went crazy? Because it’s more than just a little bit of weirdness – he’s seriously messed up.”

Maddie nodded. “There was nobody to help balance his core, so it started to rule his emotions and he became unstable. Instability in cores generates unhealthy obsessions and unpredictable behaviour. Unbalanced cores also cause outbursts of power, which is why it took twenty years for the Guys in White to let him out of their facilities – he was too dangerous.”

“He’s still dangerous now,” Danny grumbled. “Is that why you were checking my core before? For balance?”

“Yes,” Maddie responded once she had swallowed her latest mouthful. “I know it’s a bit uncomfortable but without the proper equipment I had to use my hands. Usually in the Ghost Zone we use scanners and it’s far less painful for the kids. They usually get a treat afterwards like you used to at the dentist when you were younger.”

Danny reached for another piece of pizza. “So you were born in the Ghost Zone?”

Maddie made an affirmative sound around a mouthful of food and Jack swooped in. “She sure was!” he exclaimed. “Mads comes from a huge halfa clan, and your aunt Alicia was born a human so your mum helped her move into our world when she got old enough to choose. That’s when I met them!”

The weight was completely gone from their conversation with the change in topic, and Danny felt himself relax at the positive contentment that the memory seemed to stir from both of his parents.

Maddie’s smile delicately creased the skin around her eyes. “Your father was unlike anyone I’d met before,” she said. “He noticed the Guys in White around us and managed to push his way in by offering to check Alicia’s new house for ghosts. I wanted to know more about human ghost hunters and so I decided to wear the limiter so I could go to university with Jack and learn more about human attitudes. I’d planned to go back to the Ghost Zone once I graduated to bring the information back to my clan but your father and I got a bit too close for me to want to leave.”

Danny rolled his eyes at the affection that emanated from them in waves. “But you realised you loved Dad when he saved you from the proto portal. It couldn’t hurt you though, right?”

“It’s the thought that counts,” Jack interjected, incredulity playful in his tone.

Maddie smiled. “Exactly,” she said. “Self-sacrifice is unusual in the Ghost Zone since we don’t get hurt or age the same way when our cores are active.”

“So why didn’t you two move into the Ghost Zone to escape the Guys in White?”

Their emotions grew dull, Jack’s output brimming with a sudden sharp feeling of inadequacy while Maddie just felt sad. “It’s the Ghost Zone law,” she explained as Jack shoved more pizza into his mouth in what Danny felt was an effort to drown out the negative thoughts. “Creatures without cores are encouraged to leave but can stay there if they were born there. Creatures without cores aren’t permitted to move in. It’s always been the rules.”

Danny snorted as he remembered something. “Yeah, Walker got really mad when he thought I was bringing human-world contraband into the Ghost Zone.” His mother’s sudden hot streak of anger surprised him and Danny frowned at her. “What?”

Jack looked up as well, his interest clearly piqued by the obvious nonverbal communication. It should have been unsettling but his interest somehow made Danny feel less like a science experiment and more like part of the family again.

Maddie clenched her fingers tightly around her bottle. “Walker has no jurisdiction over you,” she snapped. “Did he hurt you?”

Danny shrugged. “He doesn’t like me being a halfa. He’s locked me up a couple of times, pretty standard stuff…” He trailed off as her eyes shone with a radioactive sheen and fury began to radiate from her.

“Mads,” Jack said, reaching across the table to put a hand over hers, “calm down. We’ll catch that filthy ghost next time he tries to come through the portal.”

She was still stressed and Danny decided to try to project positive emotions to calm her down. He thought about the wind that still hammered the house and the way it made his core sing. The sky out there was so inviting, and he was eager to shoot up there and ride the storm’s waves until he rose above them to float in a dark stillness freckled with the sparks of stars.

The perfect peace of a dark night sky rippled through the room like a stone being dropped into a pond, and Maddie’s anger faded in its wake. She looked at him and Danny felt a flush of embarrassment at her pride. No words were exchanged – her emotions were all the praise he needed.

Jack drew his hand back when he noticed that his wife had relaxed and Danny wondered what his father must be experiencing as he watched the two of them communicate in such an inhuman way. He knew that if he were in that situation himself he probably would have felt left out, but so far the predominant emotions coming from Jack had been positive.

The man in question folded an entire piece of pizza and shoved the whole thing into his mouth, and Danny stopped worrying. Jack was always easy to read so if anything started to turn sour Danny and Maddie would be the first people to know about it.

“So,” Danny said, “what’s the deal with the Guys in White anyway? You said they needed my ectosignature?”

Maddie turned to Jack. “Did you call them?” she asked.

Jack bobbed his head. “Mhm,” he mumbled around his food. He held up his hand, making an exaggerated show of swallowing the food. “Man, that’s good pizza. They said they’re too busy to come here tonight but that we can meet them later in the square. I think they said eleven thirty.”

Maddie sighed, and Danny wondered at her weary exasperation. “We’ll be there by eleven,” she insisted. “Don’t give them any excuse to say that we’re not cooperating.”

“You argue with them all the time,” Jack commented, and Danny stared at his mother in open surprise.

She seemed amused by his shock, but there was a wariness there that concerned him. Maddie sent him a soothing calm that wafted through the room like a gentle breeze and he settled again. “I don’t want any trouble with that gun,” she clarified. “It’s no good insulting them when that thing is still calibrated to shoot Danny.”

Jack made an affirmative sound before turning more fully to face his son. Danny paused mid-bite at the sudden decisive way that his father squared his shoulders. “So, Danny-boy, I think it’s time you came clean.”

He frowned. “Wha-”

Jack’s brows had drawn together in the middle, his mouth pinching into a pout as he brandished a crust of pizza in the air. “What’ve you been doing as Phantom, hm? Kidnapping the mayor is one thing, but I can’t believe that you’ve been stealing my fudge!”


	7. Impact

****

It started pouring as they left. Danny sat in the drivers’ seat, fingers tight around the steering wheel as his mother directed him to back down the driveway. “It’s good for you to get some rain driving,” she said. “Slow… Turn… The other way… Yes.”

Danny chewed his lower lip as he pressed hit foot against the clutch and shifted the RV from reverse to first gear with a sickening crunch. The engine shuddered and the vehicle hopped forwards with a jerk before stalling. He made a frustrated sound, flipping the windscreen wipers from moderate to high before slamming against the clutch and turning the key in the ignition again. “I don’t see why I need a driving lesson now,” he grumbled as Jack howled with laughter from the back seat.

“You can’t always rely on your powers to fly you around,” Maddie reminded him. “Now gently accelerate…” The car revved and Danny caught her smile out of the corner of his eye. “Not that much, remember to take your foot off the clutch at the same time…”

The RV jerked forwards again, but this time it kept moving. Danny dragged the steering wheel to one side to prevent them from mounting the kerb and the engine screamed as they began to drive down the road.

“Second gear,” his mother reminded him, and he hit the clutch again and tugged the gearstick into position. Gears ground together, the car gave another shaky jerk, and Danny’s hands were so slick with sweat that he was worried that they’d slip off the steering wheel. His heart beat loud in his ears and he hoped that there were no other cars out this late in such terrible weather.

His mother told him to change gears again, her soft emotions helping to quell some of his anxiety, and he moved to third with another frenzied movement. This time they moved a bit faster and he hunched over the steering wheel, desperately watching the white lines on the road and trying to stay in his lane. The power of the vehicle was unnerving and he found himself thinking that just one little mistake would be enough to ruin someone’s life. The concept wasn’t necessarily a foreign one, so he pushed it away before he could begin to dwell on dark thoughts from a future that would never happen.

It was fresh in his mind after the conversation over dinner – they had spoken for hours but he still hadn’t managed to explain a lot of things, especially the darker issues that he’d faced in the past. He wasn’t even really sure if he knew _how_. The engine complained as he tried to ease it to a stop at an intersection and Danny welcomed the distraction. He just needed to focus on one thing at a time…

By the time they drove the couple of blocks to the town square he was so full of adrenaline that he felt like he’d just been in a fight. Danny tugged the steering wheel to one side and the car jolted as two of its wheels ran up over the gutter. He slammed one foot into the clutch and the other on the brake, the seatbelt cutting into his shoulder as the vehicle mercifully jerked to a stop.

“Flying’s easier,” he said as both of his parents laughed. He pulled the keys out of the ignition and passed them to his mother. “I can’t believe that we’re actually doing this.”

Compared to his mess of anxious stress her emotional output was incredibly calm. He felt like she had enveloped him in a comforting blanket and Danny instinctively reached for his mother’s hand. She was wearing her HAZMAT now, so his skin met her glove, but the added closeness of the contact helped to soothe his heightened emotions. Though stressful, the drive had been a good distraction, and Danny knew that his parents were trying their best to keep things as normal as possible after the revelations of the past day.

Through the deluge he could see white figures approaching the car.

Danny tensed, pressing back into his seat and tightening his grip on his mother’s hand. Maddie squeezed back, then slipped intangibly out of his grasp and through the door. He watched as she met the agents outside and their figures stood in the circle of light beneath a streetlamp. Rain shone in the orange beam and added a soft fuzziness to their forms. The two agents dripped with every movement but his mother’s hair stayed light around her head, and Danny smirked at her use of intangibility to stay dry.

The car’s engine ticked gently as it began to cool and Danny’s father shifted in the back seat. “Any idea what they’re saying?”

Danny shrugged. The rain drummed against the roof of the van as trees twisted in the gale. “I can’t hear them, but it feels like Mum’s pretty chill. The agents feel a bit pissed off about something though.”

“Probably the rain,” Jack offered.

Danny made a non-committal sound, floating backwards through his seat so that he was sitting next to him. Jack’s stress mounted and Danny was suddenly acutely aware of the fact that they hadn’t yet shared a moment alone since everything happened. He scooted closer, bumping their knees and shoulders together in a casual movement.

Jack dragged his hands down his face, and Danny waited. Nobody outside had moved much but his mother seemed to be speaking – her hands made small gestures that probably punctuated her comments.

The pressure inside the car mounted as Jack visibly struggled with something that he wanted to say. Danny pushed back with a lighter emotion before remembering that it was useless. He ran his fingers over the back of his hand, feeling the invisible ridges of a wound that was still healing. “You never hurt me too badly,” he said. The words were almost lost as wind slammed into the van.

His guess seemed to be spot on. Jack sagged, shoulders drooping as he looked down at his lap. “I did hurt you though.”

Danny bumped their shoulders again. “Well yeah, but _everyone_ wants a piece of my hide, so it’s not like it was personal or anything.”

“Why didn’t we see it?” Jack demanded, turning to frown at his son. Danny was caught in the lines of his father’s face – the dim interior of the car was only lit by the light outside, so the small wrinkles around Jack’s features became deep valleys of shadow. He was suddenly struck by how _weary_ Jack was and couldn’t prevent a stab of guilt at his contribution to it all.

“I hide it,” he confessed. His father tensed with a sharp breath. Danny immediately wondered if he even should have said that much, after everything that they had already worked through that day, but his mother had now turned around and was moving back to the car. She wrenched the back door open and the moment was lost.

“Come on,” she said, reaching a dry hand into the back and grasping Jack’s hand. He shivered and sank partially through the seat before being pulled intangibly from the car. Danny followed behind them, shifting himself out of the tangible spectrum as well. He felt nothing as rain fell straight through him. “I told the agents that Phantom would only appear if we were there to support him,” Maddie said, her soft words almost lost in the storm.

Danny nodded with an affirmative hum and the three of them moved so he could close the car door – not that it really mattered, but he guessed that living in a tangible world gave you habits that were difficult to break. He’d been hiding his powers for so long that using them in front of his parents felt strange on some deep instinctual level and it was almost tempting to just turn tangible and allow himself to get wet. Walking was a bit complicated, since it was all too easy to fall through the floor if you didn’t focus on viewing that as solid. Intangibility was really all to do with the mind – if you viewed something as insubstantial, then it was. If you viewed yourself as the only thing in the universe, nothing could touch you.

Maddie began to walk towards a cluster of floodlights nearby, practically dragging Jack so that he didn’t slide into the asphalt like a video game character clipping through the floor. Danny considered floating but decided against it – he wasn’t sure what the agents had figured out so far and he wanted to hold onto any advantage that he might still have. He lurched forwards, grabbing his mother’s arm and moving along with her to give the impression that she was the one keeping him dry.

The square had more people there than he had expected. He hadn’t noticed them before, the storm impairing his ability to sense emotions more than a few paces away, but as Danny moved through the rain with his parents he realised that there were about a dozen people already there. It made sense and he didn’t know why he had only been expecting the two agents but anxiety clawed at his gut. Maddie tried to soothe him but lightning tore apart the clouds and the raw energy in the air made both of them jump. Intangibility faltered for a moment, all three of them darkening around their shoulders with heavy raindrops before Danny managed to haul them back out of the physical plane. His mother’s core added to his, and she took over for herself and his father. Danny transferred the load a bit clumsily and scowled as thunder rolled around them. He felt wrong, like he was fumbling in the dark without a sense of direction or purpose.

It scared him.

As they drew closer to the light in the middle of the square he saw everything more clearly. The shadows and shapes became better defined, their jumble of emotions less static-y with proximity. They were white-suited agents, their clothing as wet as if it had been raining for hours instead of ten minutes. It was really too windy for them to hold umbrellas and work on their machines at the same time.

Rain lashed against the gun that crouched like a predator in the middle of the square. Its exterior was smooth and metallic and reminded Danny of cannons he had seen in space films. It was about the size of a small car and was welded to a large base that looked like it had been bolted to the ground. The weapon appeared to be ball-bearing, with the ability to swivel and shoot in any direction. Cables thicker than his forearm snaked around its base, disappearing into the ground.

“You built this whole thing today?” Danny wondered as his mother’s anxiety buzzed beside him.

The agents close enough to hear him swivelled their heads at his comment. The two that he recognised as his regular hunters, and who had spoken to his mother only a minute earlier, shifted so that they stood right in front of the trio.

“We assembled it today,” the taller one answered, and Danny wondered how he could see anything in the gloom from behind those dark glasses. Danny stared at the man’s face, right where his eyes should be, smirking when the agent turned his head to look away.

The other agent reached out, his hand sinking through the space that Danny’s shoulder should have occupied, and Danny’s grin grew wider. “It’s handy having a parent with ghost powers,” he teased, squeezing his mother’s arm as he sensed her amusement. “I don’t even need an umbrella.” Not that one would have functioned very well in this weather anyway – the wind gusted far too strongly, and Danny felt a stab of sympathy for the others before reminding himself that they had chosen to stay out in this storm.

He knew why he’d come as his human self – they’d _discussed_ this already – but he was still nervous. It was better to be in as much control as possible. If he came as a human, he asserted himself as the one in charge – Danny would choose when to tell them the truth, not the other way around.

Besides, if he had flown in there as his ghostly self who knows how many of the agents would have shot him on sight?

His parents moved closer to the gun and Danny allowed himself to be towed along. They drew close enough to touch it and the irrational urge to run his hands over the smooth metal surface was almost too strong for Danny to ignore. He wrenched his gaze away from the weapon, looking instead at the agents gathered around them. Male and female, they all looked similar to each other – plain hairstyles where it hadn’t been shaved off, white suits, and dark glasses that reflected the portable floodlights. No real defining features whatsoever.

“Where’s Phantom?” one of them asked, her voice clipped as irritation swirled around them.

Danny reminded himself that he was the one in control even if it didn’t really feel like it right now. He could choose what to do. Several agents had gathered around them as the rest continued to pack up equipment that had been scattered over the cobblestones. Feeling hemmed in, Danny took a step back. His movement tugged on Maddie’s arm but she didn’t let go. He felt something brush against his back with the slightest whisper of proximity and he jolted forwards again, away from the dark metallic surface of the gun that was still very much able to blast him to smithereens.

The agent who had spoken seemed amused, her emotion eddying around him as she watched that little display. Danny tried to look confident by squaring his shoulders and angling his chin slightly upwards. He tried to exude confidence in the hope that they would back off, and he was suddenly very grateful for his mother’s steady support as she bolstered him with a wave of determination.

Danny realised that nobody had responded to the woman’s question. His parents had told him that this was his call – _he_ could choose what to say and when to say it.

It wasn’t much, but Danny decided that if these agents were going to find out anyway then he might as well exert his control while he still had it. He released Maddie’s arm, dropping his hand down by his side and remaining intangible.

The rain fell straight through him.

Realisation began to drizzle through the sodden air and Danny stood still, waiting to see what they would do. None of the agents seemed prepared to break the moment and he was acutely aware of the way the wind snapped their clothes against their bodies with the slap of wet fabric. He was unruffled in comparison, hair and clothing light and airy in a way that almost defied gravity.

“I heard you wanted my ectosignature,” he finally said.

The agents that his mother had spoken to earlier were the first to move. One of them – slightly taller than the other – produced something from his pocket that looked pretty similar to the blood pressure cuff that Jack had been working on before dinner. “Mr. Phantom, I presume?” the man asked.

Danny stood stiffly, squaring his jaw and trying to appear confident.  He held his ground as the two men stepped into his personal space, trying not to be unnerved by the dangerous satisfaction that he felt from them.

When they reached for him he was as insubstantial as air.

“Let’s get something straight here,” Danny snapped, unfettering his core just enough that he could see the reflection of his glowing green eyes in their dark glasses. “The past three years have been an absolute _nightmare_ because you wouldn’t let my parents tell me anything. I didn’t know about them, they didn’t know about me, and I’m still _beyond pissed_ at you guys. I protect this town from some pretty nasty ghosts, so you don’t _touch_ me unless I say so.”

The shorter agent pressed his lips together in a thin line. “We would appreciate your co-operation for our research.”

Danny snorted. “You had Vlad for twenty years and you still bother my mum. You’re not gunna find out anything new from me. Leave us alone or you can deal with the ghosts yourself.”

It was an empty threat, but he hoped that they didn’t know that.

Their discomfort was as swollen as the dark clouds overhead. He wondered if they knew that he could sense their emotions, but before Danny could try to squeeze more out of them the agent holding the glowing cuff gave a sharp nod. “If you step out of line we’ll take you down,” he warned.

Danny trickled a chill into his voice that wasn’t entirely human. “I don’t plan on it.”

His parents’ surprise at the tense conversation radiated from where they stood beside him and Danny was grateful that they hadn’t interrupted. He guessed that his mother had sensed his resolve and understood that he needed to do this himself. The Guys in White were bullies, just like Dash, and Danny was tired of taking the lickings. He got that enough from the ghosts already.

He shucked off his intangibility with a shift in perspective and the rain began to weigh him down immediately. His hoodie that was more for show than actual warmth was wet on the shoulders and down his arms in moments, and Danny’s fringe clung to his forehead and began to drip into his eyes. He phased off the jumper, passing it to Jack before standing in front of the agents again.

They were waiting for him, irritation seething from the shorter one while the obvious leader of the two was simply amused. Despite seeming to have the upper hand Danny suddenly felt exhausted at the prospect of constantly having to deal with these men on such a personal basis. He stuck out his arm, nodding at them in vague permission.

The cuff slid across his skin with the uncomfortable rub of wet canvas and the second agent held out his own arm as a stable surface for Danny to prop his wrist against. The first agent pulled the cuff tight, pressing down the Velcro and plugging the trailing cord into a PDA in a snap lock bag to keep it dry. He tapped something on the screen and the cuff began to inflate around Danny’s bicep, growing tight in the same way that a normal blood pressure cuff would.

They had done this the normal human way in their biology class during a lesson a few weeks earlier, and the familiarity was enough to soothe Danny in what was otherwise an incredibly absurd situation. “You can’t just scan me or something?” he joked.

The pinch on his skin began to slowly decrease and Danny forced himself to keep his arm still as rain trickled down his back and beneath the waistband of his jeans. His shirt was now clinging to him, and water had rushed through the canvas of his shoes as it swirled around their feet. “Ectosignatures can be complicated,” Maddie supplied from off to the side. “There are usually a few layers, especially if you have an elemental section in your core.”

Danny hummed as the cuff finished deflating. “That was pretty painless,” he admitted, withdrawing his arm and unpeeling the Velcro with a satisfying ripping sound. “What, no needles? Blood samples? Trying to cut me into tiny pieces to study my molecules?”

He knew it was a dark stab at humour, but the way the agents tensed was worth it. Danny couldn’t really discern what they were thinking though. Lightning cracked overhead, jumbling his thoughts, and all he could sense was a vague blend of satisfaction and anticipation. It was almost as though they were waiting for something to happen.

Danny glanced around, shifting himself back into intangibility with an instinctive shake as he phased off the water that currently covered him. Something wasn’t quite right but he couldn’t pinpoint what the issue was. Maddie was anxious as well, and he looked over at her with a frown.

There was another flash of lightning and a younger-looking agent squawked as he tripped over his own feet. A jumble of items that he had been carrying clattered to the ground, one of them a glass container that shattered as it hit the cobblestones.

Green mist billowed out from the broken containment unit, unaffected by the driving rain, and ice flooded Danny’s limbs and gathered in his lungs in a freezing breath. He shifted into a more stable stance, curling his hands into fists that glowed with carefully controlled charges. The agents shifted away from him, and the one on the ground scrambled to their feet with a shout.

“Who keeps a ghost in a glass container anyway?” Danny scoffed as the mist began to solidify into a familiar shape. “Ugh, you’ve _gotta_ be kidding me.”

“Whelp,” the ghost sneered. Raindrops pinged against his hollow armour, the ecto-fire of his Mohawk burning strong despite the downpour.

“Hey, helmet-hair,” Danny drawled, “the Guys in White caught _you?_ The Ghost Zone’s ‘greatest hunter’?” He punctuated those final words with finger quotations, the continued sizzle of ectoplasm around his hands reassuring in such an off-kilter situation.

Skulker spread his hands wide. His eyes blazed and fury rolled off him in overwhelming waves. Danny responded by unfettering his own core, pounding the ghost with irritation. This was the way he had become accustomed to communicating – no nuances of inference that he needed to delicately decode as subtext to conversations. This was far blunter, just shoving base annoyances at the opponent and receiving their emotional swings in return.

Danny tried to ignore his mother’s concern, flicking some confidence her way. He could handle this…

A blast arced through the darkness and its neon beam barely missed Skulker. It streamed past the hunter with a brightness that hurt Danny’s eyes before slamming into Maddie’s shoulder.

“Mum!” Danny cried, throwing up a shield and turning towards her shout of pain.

“I’m okay,” she grunted. She was tangible now, the rain quickly plastering her fringe to her face. Her hand was clasped over the site of injury and she partially leaned on her husband, breathing heavily as Jack tried to take a look at the injury. Dark blood and bright ectoplasm seeped through the gaps in her fingers. “I’m okay,” she said again, resignation brushing against Danny’s anger in a dull touch that lacked the vibrant _awareness_ of two-way communication. “It’s just shorted out my powers.”

Danny spun to face the threat again, glaring at the agent who had released the shot. “Watch your aim!” he spat, dropping his shield and stalking towards Skulker. “And _you!_ I’m a bit too busy right now for your stupid games!”

He knew that he was being caustic, and that such an outward display of anger probably wouldn’t help to improve his relationship with the Guys in White, but right now Danny couldn’t bring himself to care. His limbs had turned to ice, the tips of his fingers frozen with rage. He didn’t know who he was the angriest at – Skulker for being a jerk, the Guys in White for what was obviously a setup, or himself for thinking that this evening would actually go smoothly. His face was so cold that he couldn’t even feel it anymore and the raindrops close to him eyes grew brighter with the illumination from how brilliantly he must be glowing. The air crackled as little wisps of energy snapped around him like tiny bolts of lightning.

Skulker’s cocky attitude faltered, the flames of his hair diminishing as he floated back a few paces. “Oooh, someone’s pissed,” he taunted, his stupid hollow voice tinny in the storm.

“You have one chance to back off,” Danny warned.

Skulker’s indecision lingered for a second longer before Danny was slammed with a resurgence of the ghost’s typical arrogance. “Your pelt will be mine!” he roared, jerking his arms in a movement that triggered blasters to unfold from panels in his greaves. They fired small rockets that fizzed like sparklers, and the agents dived to the ground as Danny sidestepped the shot with a simple movement.

“Skulker, I’m really not in the mood,” he warned, pushing against the mood with his own anger. The agents hung back with blasters in their hands but none raised to fire, and he wondered if they weren’t shooting because they didn’t want to risk hitting each other or if there was another, more sinister reason.

Danny rolled his eyes and took a step back into a more stable stance. Something crunched under his heel, and even though Skulker’s guns were beginning to glow again and he shouldn’t take his eyes off his opponent Danny glanced down to see what he had inadvertently stepped on.

A sealed plastic bag was beneath his shoe, the PDA inside crushed from the pressure of his foot. The agent who had thrown himself down to avoid Skulker’s rockets had his hand outstretched, reaching for the bag, but his emotions were as calm as a still summer day and Danny knew in an instant that this had been deliberate…

A rocket whizzed by his head, trailing sparks like a firework in the darkness. The other one collided with Danny’s chest with a sickening crunch and he was thrown backwards by the impact. He landed on top of the agent, a sharp elbow digging into his back as Danny wheezed for air. It took a moment for the pain to hit and he whimpered when it did. He’d lost intangibility again, and he rolled off the struggling man, trying to blink sudden tears and rain from his eyes. He needed to focus, the danger was still there, but that rocket had sent bolts of energy through him that made his core fuzzy… Water whirled around his fingers as he pushed himself onto his hands and knees, ignoring the searing pain in his ribs, and then a large hand closed over Danny’s head and _yanked._

Danny yelped as he was lifted off the ground by his hair. He couldn’t phase, his core felt like it was deep underwater, and Danny grasped Skulker’s arm in an effort to take some of the weight off his scalp. Using this new leverage, Danny swung his lower body forwards, his knee slamming into the seam where Skulker’s abdomen met his hips. The impact left a good dent in the metal, and Skulker grunted as Danny repeated the motion. The distraction was enough for the hunter’s grip to loosen, and Danny tugged himself out of the hold on his hair.

As soon as his feet hit the ground he jabbed an uppercut beneath Skulker’s chin. It wasn’t powerful enough to remove the helmet – Danny noticed some sort of buckle in the crevice beneath his ear that hadn’t been there before – but the force still sent the ghost reeling backwards.

“Does anybody have a thermos or something?!” Danny shouted. He’d left his at home, lulled into a false sense of security that had come from knowing his mother’s secret. The agent that he had landed on a moment earlier had gotten to his feet by now, sidling away with a shake of his head.

Skulker had already recovered from the hit and unsheathed a long hunting knife that began to glow red like the element in the heater at home. Raindrops sizzled on its surface and Danny pulled a face.

“You’re toast,” the hunter snarled.

“Too bad I hate toast,” Danny shot back, “though with your complexion you could probably use some time in our toaster.”

He had been in human form for too long – they needed to take the fight into the air so nobody else got hurt. His core was steadying again, the interference from the rocket’s impact fading away, and his powers rushed back online like someone had flicked a switch. Danny felt his gut clench as lights began to flicker on along the length of the giant gun next to him. He had to wrap this up quickly and get out of range, since the broken PDA at his feet probably wasn’t going to be able to input his ectosignature in time.

“Turn the gun off!” he snapped at the agents.

Skulker lunged at him and Danny ducked out of the way of the blade.

“It’s automated,” the female agent from earlier shouted. “It takes half an hour to deactivate!”

Danny dodged another swing, slamming an ectoblast into his assailant’s helmet. Skulker reeled backwards again and Danny took the opportunity to sweep away his human form. The light of his transformation rings was unbearably bright, far brighter than the floodlights that struggled to illuminate the square, and Danny brushed white bangs away from where they dripped into his eyes and threw himself into the air.

His anger had built into utter fury but he still wasn’t sure to whom it was directed.

The tip of Skulker’s blade bit into his bicep and Danny swore before he could stop himself. It was as hot as it looked, and he sent a blast of ice in the direction of the weapon before shooting himself up into the sky.

Turning intangible again to try to keep the rain out of his eyes, Danny hovered just beneath the clouds. The storm buffeted him with raw waves of power, wind searing through his insubstantial body and electricity flickering in the clouds just above his head. His core sang in response and Danny felt a grin creep across his face. Everything else fell away as for a wonderful moment of freedom it was just him and the raging energy.

Skulker was rising fast, his Mohawk streaming behind him in a ribbon of flame as he brandished the hunting knife, and Danny raised his own glowing hands in preparation for a fight.

A blast whizzed past him, not from the approaching enemy but from somewhere off to his right. Danny twisted to avoid Skulker’s swing, scowling at the person who had joined them in the sky. “Lightning’s a thing you know!” he shouted, freezing the joint in Skulker’s shoulder to make it harder for the ghost to fight with that knife. “You’re in a metal suit!”

“What do you care?!” she screamed over the weather, and Danny broke away from Skulker as an arc of energy streamed through the space between them.

He rolled his eyes and blasted Skulker in the face again – that stupid helmet just wasn’t coming _off!_ – and then zipped through the air until he was floating in front of the Red Huntress. “Catch him, would you? I don’t have my thermos.”

She raised her gun in response and he ducked out of the way, chuckling as her blast nailed the ghost that had been sneaking up behind him. Skulker was sent cartwheeling backwards, and Danny rose closer to her again. Not that she couldn’t take a hit or two, and given the chance she would probably shoot him as well, but he wasn’t sure if her suit would be able to withstand a direct lightning strike…

Several things slammed into him with a terrific force that practically threw him on top of the huntress, and Danny shrieked as the pain tore through delicate organs and dug deep into his core. He didn’t know what had happened to him, just that something was awfully wrong and he _hurt_ , but then his ghost form slipped through his thoughts like water and Danny Fenton barely managed to wrap his arm around Valerie’s ankle as he fell.

Rain streamed into his eyes and he held on with everything he had as wind buffeted his dangling body. His grip felt like it was going to slip off her boot and he swung his other arm up, hooking it over the edge of her board. The movement tugged at the painful lines inside him and he _screamed,_ something metallic strong on his tongue and pouring over his lips when he opened his mouth.

“Val,” he choked, kicking his legs in the wild air as he pressed his cheek against the smooth metal of her board. He wasn’t even sure if she could hear him over the storm and he could only count himself lucky that she didn’t kick him off. Down in the darkness below Danny could just make out the green blur of Skulker’s falling body. Whatever had happened, it had caught both ghosts indiscriminately.

Something crackled in the air around them and Danny glanced up at the clouds in horror. His core was on fire, melting through his limbs and tearing horrible choking cries from his chest with every breath, but Danny pushed past all of that and flourished his hand as best he could without letting go of the only thing stopping him from falling into the night. A transparent green shield materialised around them and Danny’s core _burned_ hotter than anything he had ever felt except maybe the portal, and a blinding stream of lightning exploded against its surface with an intensity that no man-made weapon had ever hit him with.

His ears rang with the instant explosion of thunder and his shield collapsed as the lightning disappeared, but the image of the red huntress gazing down at him as she was illuminated by the energy was seared into his vision. Her horror buffeted over him, and Danny tried to say something, _anything,_ but when he opened his mouth more blood and ectoplasm gushed out and dripped onto the board beneath him.

“ _Danny?!_ ” she cried, voice tinny in his ringing ears, and he could only hope that her suit had protected her from the thunder’s intense noise.

“Land,” he choked wetly, jerking his head towards the floodlights far below them. The initial shock was beginning to wear off and he realised that he’d been stabbed by several long, thin projectiles that had driven their way through him to reach his core. They cut through his chest and abdomen, and he guessed that at least one of them had stabbed a lung from the way he was struggling to breathe.

Valerie didn’t move, her emotions a mess of guilt and terror and other horrible things as the two of them floated in the tempest. Danny tightened his arm around her leg, unable to stop himself from sobbing. The sounds coming out of his mouth were strange in his own ears, twisted into choking gasps that splattered her board and her boots with more dark blood and glowing ectoplasm. “ _Please,”_ he begged.

For another long moment nothing happened, but then vertigo tugged at his stomach and Danny tried his best to hold on as they dropped out of the sky.


	8. Grounded

A high-pitched whine penetrated the white noise of rainfall. The giant gun swivelled on its ball-bearings, swinging to point directly upwards, and loosed several shots into the darkness.

A faint scream filtered through the deluge and Maddie’s heart clenched. “No,” she breathed, tilting her head back and trying to gaze up into the night. She could see nothing but the falling rain that streamed into her eyes. Everything had gone wrong so quickly and guilt clawed at the spaces beneath her ribs.

She clasped her hand over her shoulder like a vice, and blood and ectoplasm seeped between her fingers from the burn and mingled with the rain on her waterproof jumpsuit. She pushed internally against her unresponsive core but it slid through her thoughts, there but far too insubstantial for her to catch hold of. Every part of her screamed that she needed to be able to use her powers again, that she  _ needed _ to help Danny up there in the darkness.

She hated how useless it made her feel.

Lightning split the sky far overhead and its brightness cut through the artificial haze that surrounded them. It was too far away to be certain, but Maddie thought she saw a flash of green against the white light.

Something smashed into the top of the van and she spun at the hollow crash. She clenched her hands into fists and squinted through the dark downpour, relief flooding through her when she recognised the armoured ghost instead of her son. His outfit had been blown apart by the impact and pieces of metal scattered across the square. The helmet rolled forlornly along the cobblestones in an awkward asymmetrical path similar to that of a football, loping gently to a standstill just outside the floodlights’ direct beam. The Mohawk spluttered in a valiant effort to stay alight before dimming down to the faintest wisps, the helmet’s eyes growing dark as the electronics within completely shorted out. A small green blob crawled out of the broken mouth with a grunt and stuck up its middle finger before fading out of the visible spectrum.

“GHOST!” Jack bellowed, diving for the helmet. He turned it over in his hands and upon finding it empty he drop-kicked it into the night. It sailed across the square and clattered to a stop on the footpath across the street. “That’ll learn ya!” he crowed. “Stay away from my family!”

Maddie turned her face toward the sky again. The floodlights caught the rain and made it difficult to see beyond their reach, casting a hazy illumination that made everything seem more surreal. She blinked water out of her eyes, brushing away the hair that had stuck to her forehead and cheeks. Rain trickled beneath the collar of her suit and Maddie shivered reflexively at the feeling - it wasn’t exactly  _ cold _ against her skin anymore, but the sensation alone was uncomfortable.

The gun that started all this returned to its normal position, sitting quietly like nothing had happened in the first place. Maddie clenched her teeth at the thought. “If Danny’s still up there then why isn’t it shooting at him?” she wondered.

Jack looped his arm around her waist, his soggy presence warm at her side. The sensation was comforting in its familiarity, and made her remember late-night ghost hunts in all sorts of weather. The contact soothed her thoughts before they became too overwhelming. 

“He’ll be okay,” he reassured her. “He always is.”

Maddie shook her head. She opened her mouth to speak but then a mechanical whir filled the night.

The familiar form of the Red Huntress descended into view, her hoverboard’s engine protesting the extra weight hanging off its front. Danny was draped over the board with his lower half dangling freely in the air. The first thing Maddie noticed was the terrible sobbing that came from her son and she tore away from her husband, running to stand beneath the board.

“Give him to me!” she shouted, reaching as high as she could. Her injured shoulder burned like someone had pressed a knife against it, but she gritted her teeth and didn’t drop her arm.

Red’s head tilted. She paused in her descent and stayed high enough to be out of range. Maddie faintly heard her mumble, “What the hell…”

Something dark dribbled down onto Maddie’s upturned cheeks, accompanied by drops that glowed like tiny green stars as they fell. “Red!” she shrieked, jumping as high as she could and making frantic grabbing motions in the air. Danny’s sneaker was just that  _ tiny _ bit too high for her to touch, and her helplessness was made all the more infuriating by the first trickle of ice back into her veins. Her core was finally recovering from the shot ten minutes ago, but it was still far too slow, and the continued drops of Danny’s blood and ectoplasm mocked her as they hit her face and outstretched hands. “He’s bleeding!”

“You shot him!” the huntress shouted back. Her dark visor obscured her expression, but the acid in her tone was sharp and felt like a slap. “He’s half human and you hunters  _ shot _ him!”

“No, I’m his mother!” Maddie tried to explain.

“I  _ know!” _ Red roared.

Everything seemed to pause. Maddie stared at the figure standing on the board as a strange feeling pricked her. This was like the other night - she was brushing against a secret so vast that it would change everything. A gust of wind swept against her and Maddie felt like her life was being tugged in an entirely new direction, one where the old rules no longer applied.

Danny made a choking sound and kicked his legs feebly in the air. “Mum,” he gasped, and the sound tore at her heart.

The Red Huntress still didn’t move.

“I can help him,” Maddie insisted. The cold from her core was stronger now, and freezing static sent pins and needles through her outstretched hands. She channeled the energy to build up behind her eyes and hoped that it was enough to make them glow. She could see herself in Red’s mirrored visor, and the shining green reflection was jarring against the darkness. Maddie hoped that it would be enough. “I’m a halfa too. See my shoulder - they shot me so I couldn’t fly up there with him. Thank you for catching him, but  _ please, _ let me help him now.”

The agents stirred at her words and their frustration brushed across her awakening senses, but Maddie was just too far done with this day to care about their policies anymore.

Red’s fury had dulled, a shocked suspicion filtering across the space between them. “You hunt ghosts,” she said.

Maddie scowled at her. “It’s complicated. We can talk later,” she suggested, “when my  _ son _ is no longer  _ bleeding.” _

Convinced, the Red Huntress descended the rest of the way. Maddie wrapped an arm around her son’s waist as soon as she could reach him. “I’ve got you, Danny,” she soothed. “Let go now.”

His weight shifted into her and Maddie lifted him away from the board. He stiffened at the movement and let loose an unholy scream, digging his fingers into her forearms. Maddie sank to the ground, trying to cradle him in her lap as Danny continued to cry out with every movement. A familiar weight descended beside her, and she was grateful for Jack’s firm presence.

When she could finally see Danny’s face she felt like her world was going to collapse.

His skin was paler than she had ever seen it, with blood and ectoplasm dribbling over his lips with every breath. Cold, bloodless fingers clutched at her hands and his breath rasped with fluid.

“Mum,” he gargled. Blood bubbled forth in a fresh wave, spilling over his lips and running down his neck. The Red Huntress landed as well and crouched before them, producing a roll of gauze from a compartment of her suit. “It’s not much, but maybe it’ll help,” she offered, and began to unwind the fabric.

Danny’s shirt clung to him with a mixture of fluid, its original colour lost in the spreading stains. A metallic glint peeked through holes in the fabric, and Maddie lifted the ruined garment away from his skin. Her core was rapidly growing stronger now, and she phased the shirt off her son’s body in a movement that she hoped looked far more confident than she felt.

The first thing that struck her was the metal rivets scattered across his body. Judging from the way blood poured from his mouth and pooled around the wounds she judged that they must be deep, probably with some sort of spike or probe attached. There were five of them, shaped like barnacles and roughly the size of her fist, and their sharp edges dug into the skin.

“Spikes,” Danny gasped, a hand fluttering against the one embedded in his chest. “M’core.”

Maddie shushed him as the Red Huntress grimly pressed a pad of gauze against one of the rivets lower down on his stomach. Jack followed suit, balling up Danny’s red hoodie that he still held from earlier and pushing it over another one. Danny sobbed at their touch.

His panic buffeted against her, and Maddie realised that she hadn’t been helping the situation. She sent out the most soothing thoughts she could, wafting peace between them like softly falling snow.

“I know it hurts, just hang on,” she coaxed. Blood welled around her fingers and she bit back a sob, hooking her fingers over the edge of a barnacle. It stayed stubbornly tangible despite her efforts to phase it out so she pulled as hard as she could.

Danny screamed again, bucking in her lap as she tugged at the rivet. It refused to budge and Maddie’s slick gloves lost purchase on the metal.

“How do I get these off?!” she shrieked, glancing at the agents frantically. Several had moved closer, forming a loose circle around the group on the ground, and their impassive satisfaction sent an icy shard of fear into her heart.

“We’ll take him with us,” Speckles insisted. The smugness in his smile made Maddie want to blast him in the face but she held herself back, trying to keep her breathing under control as Danny shuddered against her.

This had been their goal from the beginning.

The thought made her feel sick. “No,” she countered. “I know how to help him.”

“This is not up for negotiation,” Bright Eyes snapped. He held a gun in his hand, its ominously-glowing barrel pointed directly at her. The agents pressed closer with their own guns leveled at her head, and Maddie clutched at her son as control of the situation slipped further and further away from her.

The Red Huntress pulled away and Maddie tried not to feel betrayed. She sensed a faint glimmer of determination from the masked woman, but it was quickly drowned out by the panic that streamed from her husband and son. Danny was beginning to tremble, the physical shock from being shot painfully obvious as he continued to take shallow, rasping breaths and blood gushed steadily from his mouth. Maddie wanted nothing more than to start healing him, but she couldn’t do that until the metal was removed from his body.

Something cold and hard pressed against the back of her head and she flinched - she knew the barrel of a gun when she felt one. With agents pressing in with weapons from every side she knew that there was no chance to escape.

“Hold it,” a voice snapped, and Maddie frowned at the sight of Red standing right next to the the giant gun. Her suit was still there, but her gloves had disappeared. She had a phone in her bare hand and was holding her other arm above it to try to keep it dry. “This is livestreaming to the Amity Park Ghostwatch Facebook page right now,” she said. “There are already viewers. I’m showing them that you agents just shot human Danny Fenton and now you’re trying to hide the evidence!”

The agents went still and their anxiety bled through the air.

“I saw you shoot him, and now you’re holding a  _ gun _ to another person’s  _ head!”  _ the huntress shrieked when nobody moved. Danny’s breathing was raw and ragged, and loud enough to be easily heard over the drumming of the rain.

“They’re possessed,” Bright Eyes responded.

Red snorted. “My suit has sensors which are telling me that they’re  _ not _ possessed,” she countered. “Your guns shot them with ectoblasts, so that’s where the ectoplasm is coming from.”

The pressure of the gun against the back of her head lifted, and Maddie sagged against her husband with a giddy wave of relief. The agents were restless now, and several of them looked towards Bright Eyes for answers. That was interesting - she had been under the impression that he was a simple field work grunt with how often he was seen running around the town in all kinds of weather. In contrast, here amongst his colleagues he appeared to be in some sort of authoritative position. As the wind snapped at their hair and clothing he inclined his head.

At that single non-verbal signal the agents surrounding them dispersed, hurrying to gather rain-soaked equipment in silence. The Red Huntress stood her ground, phone continually aimed at the scene. “How do you get those things off him?” she called.

Maddie frowned up at where Bright Eyes still stood above her. “Red’s right,” she said. “Get these out of my son.”

The agent’s mouth pressed into a hard line and he crouched in front of them. The Red Huntress moved closer, her phone angled so that she could still catch what was going on. The threat of the livestream seemed to be keeping the Guys in White accountable, and Maddie found that her feelings toward the masked huntress had softened considerably over the past few minutes.

Danny moaned and dug his fingers into the skin around one of the rivets.

“Hold on,” she coaxed. Her boy closed his eyes, and the thought of what might be happening inside his body made her want to scream. She could sense the way his core stuttered, its typical strong signature fluctuating as he tried to keep himself awake. His powers were probably the only thing keeping him with her right now, but even that was fading as fast as sunlight disappearing in the evening. She needed to get him home and into an ectoplasmic bath. His core would be able to heal practically anything if it was just given sufficient energy to do so…

He flinched when Bright Eyes touched his bare skin, eyes snapping open to meet hers. Maddie pressed against his panic reassuringly. “We’ll get these out of you,” she explained, “and then you can get treatment.” She wanted so desperately to wrap him in her arms and hold him close. Maddie contented herself with thinking about how much she loved her son and how proud she was of him. The warm emotions acted similarly to a hug, and a moment later Danny relaxed a bit in her lap. The edge was taken off his panic, and he pushed back against her emotions with his own weary determination. He hadn’t given up yet, and neither would she.

Bright Eyes had produced a small case from the pocket inside his jacket, and he pulled the zipper open. Upon glimpsing what was inside the case Maddie tensed, drawing her arm tighter around her son before she could stop herself. Danny’s fear spiked in response to her increased stress and she wrestled with herself to calm down.

“What’s that?” Jack demanded. His suspicion was sour and Maddie was grateful for the support as he snaked his arm around her waist.

The agent removed the syringe from its foam-lined case. It was filled with a dark liquid that made her frown. “A stabiliser,” he said, jerking his head slightly in the direction of Red and her phone. “We don’t want anything delicate inside him to be hurt further.”

Maddie ground her teeth. They couldn’t say much more with the video being broadcast online, but he traced a hand down Danny’s body in a way that could be interpreted on the livestream as simply feeling the damage. It left a smear of blood down her son’s heaving chest and stomach that followed the shape of his core.

“Gun’ pass out,” Danny wheezed. His face was paper-pale, the skin stretched over his cheekbones and sinking into hollowness around his eye sockets. His breathing fluttered with his eyelashes.

She shifted one hand beneath him as surreptitiously as possible and turned her glove intangible so that flesh met flesh, channelling energy down her arm, through her fingers and into his body. Danny took a shuddering breath in response, spluttering a bit and tightening his fingers around her other hand. His gratitude swelled between them and she returned the squeeze.

She didn’t trust that syringe, but wind continued to buffet against them and rain poured from the sky in an unrelenting stream as Danny bled onto her legs. She knew that he could sense her indecision, and Maddie motioned towards the needle. “It’s a stabiliser,” she repeated. “It’ll help get the metal out of you. Do you want it?”

She knew he could read her uncertainty, and Maddie frowned at the sense of resignation she received in return. “Yeah,” Danny croaked. He loosely laid his arm out and closed his eyes, wincing as Bright Eyes leaned closer and began prodding for a vein in the crook of his elbow. His breath caught as the needle slid beneath his skin but to his credit he didn’t phase away.

The agent drew back after a moment and placed the empty syringe back into its case. “Give it a moment to work,” he suggested, tucking the case back into the pocket inside his jacket. “It takes about a minute for blood to travel around-”

“I know,” Maddie snapped, “I’m a scientist, remember?”

Danny shivered. “‘S workin’,” he breathed.

Bright Eyes pulled a device out of his pocket that looked similar to the spanner that had been used on Maddie’s limiting watch the previous evening. This one was larger with its head shaped in a way that perfectly matched the metal barnacles attached to Danny’s body. The agent clipped the spanner over one of the rivets and gave it a tug, and Danny yelped as the metal finally pulled away from his skin.

As the barnacle lifted she realised that it was still connected to him - a long metal shaft as thick as her thumb was attached to the center of the underside of the barnacle and had embedded itself in Danny’s body. As the rivet was pulled away and the spike drew itself from his stomach, dark fluid shot through with strings of ectoplasm gushed from the point of entry.

Danny sobbed as the end of the spike pulled free from his body, pushing his hand over the wound once it was clear. The spike had been almost long enough to pass right through him,  _ definitely  _ long enough to reach his core, and as she realised the full extent of what his injuries must be a metallic tang of bile soured the back of her throat. She swallowed it down and took a deep breath to maintain control over her roiling stomach.

Jack withdrew his arm from around her and reached across Danny’s body. He pressed the bloody jumper over the now-open wound with hands that trembled as though ruffled by the wind. “Four more.”

Maddie nodded. The tremor in her husband’s voice matched the terror that rolled off him, and she forced herself to keep calm. The spanner clicked onto the next rivet and she stroked her son’s hair. She visualised the soothing swirl of the portal and tried to project that peace into the space between them. It wouldn’t do Jack much good, but hopefully Danny could latch onto this calmer emotion and ride out the stress of this entire experience.

The second spike slid from his body and Danny gave a quiet whine.

“Hang in there, Dann-o,” Jack murmured, positioning the jumper so that the hood could be used to plug the gaping hole. “You’re almost halfway.”

Danny keened as the third rivet was wrenched out of the flesh just below his ribcage. Something that appeared too dense to be ectoplasm glowed on the tip of the spike. Her son’s panic slammed into her again with full force, and a bleak sense of terrible  _ wrongness _ crept between them.

“Careful,” she chided, sending the agent a glare. He didn’t react to her scolding except to lever the fourth barnacle out from where it had settled. There was even more blood now, and Maddie stopped stroking Danny’s hair so she could press against these new holes.

She glanced up at the Red Huntress. “Film the others to make sure they don’t sneak up on us,” she ordered.

Red tilted her head and swung the phone so that it faced away from them. As soon as she was sure that they were out of the frame Maddie poured freezing power through her fingers, forming a thick layer of ice that plugged the two holes. She motioned for Jack to lift the jumper and did the same for the ones that he had been tending to. Once the wounds were filled he returned the jumper to its original place, and she arranged the fabric so that it covered all of the ice in case Red needed to film them again.

Danny spluttered as the final spike pulled free from his torso, and a fresh wave of blood and ectoplasm poured from his mouth. He whimpered as Maddie instantly filled the hole with ice that plugged it all the way down to his core.

Bright Eyes got to his feet with the spikes gathered in his arms. “We’ll be in touch,” he promised.

“Piss off,” the Red Huntress snapped, swinging the camera back to face him again now that the display of spectral powers was over. Maddie tugged the jumper so that it covered the last bit of ice on Danny’s chest. The unconventional dressings probably wouldn’t be very visible in the dim light but it was better not to risk it.

Jack moved to crouch in the spot where Bright Eyes had been. “I’ll carry him,” he offered.

Maddie wanted to protest. Danny was growing quieter now, and his emotions slowed down into a pained exhaustion that weighed heavily against her. She wanted to hold her son close and never let him go, but the burning in her shoulder reminded her that it would be easier for all of them if Jack carried him to the van. She carefully snaked her arm around Danny’s back and helped to lift him into a more upright position, allowing Jack to take him into his arms.

Once Danny’s weight was gone from her she lurched to her own feet, stumbling after Jack as he began to walk toward the RV. The Red Huntress walked alongside, phone still out and aimed in the direction of the agents.

Bright Eyes stepped forward and placed his hand on Maddie’s arm. The stress of the entire evening rose within her like a tidal wave, sweeping away all restraint, and she drew back her fist and punched him in the jaw.

The impact was as satisfying as she could have hoped, and his sunglasses clattered to the ground. They stood there in stillness for a moment. Maddie’s knuckles smarted with the familiar sting of a fight, and a thin stream of blood trickled from his split lip and mingled with the rain that dripped off his chin.

She had crossed a line, but with Danny’s blood on her suit and a camera pointed at them Maddie felt far too vindicated to care about the Guys in White and their silly rules.

“Leave us alone,” she hissed, dropping her hand and stalking in the direction of the car. There was a pause, and then the Red Huntress fell into step beside her as lightning cracked across the sky.


	9. Cicatrices

“You drive.”

Valerie barely managed to catch the keys that Maddie tossed in her direction. Her heart fluttered at the notion, and if it wasn’t for the bundle of metal in her hands she would have thought that she had misheard. “ _ Me? _ ”

“Jack and I need to be in the back with Danny,” she explained, and hoisted herself through the open back doors of the van. “I need you to drive us to Fentonworks while we try to keep his core stable.”

“Shouldn’t you call an ambulance?” Valerie insisted.

Maddie’s mouth pressed into a tight line. “They won’t be able to help much with this, and the Guys in White could take him from there.” She pulled the door shut behind her, and Valerie was left standing in the rain with the keys clutched in her gloveless hand.

The rest of her suit was still in place, and rain streamed down her visor. Lightning cracked overhead and the downpour was so think that she could barely see the white lines that ran along the edges of the road. Pieces of the other ghost’s mangled armour were still scattered across the ground and Valerie kicked one of them so that it clattered into the gutter.

The agents’ vans pulled away from the kerb in a procession that appeared too perfect to have been unrehearsed. Valerie gritted her teeth at the sight, knowing that they had probably been watching her. They were a powerful organisation, and now she’d openly humiliated them. If they were anything like Vlad, they’d worm their way into her life and blackmail her with everything they could. She would have to be careful.

Time was wasting. She was the fearless Red Huntress of Amity Park! One of her only friends was bleeding out in the back of that RV, and he needed her to get him to safety.

Bitter thoughts of betrayal rose within her and she pushed them down. Her world had changed so quickly that she didn’t know what to think anymore. Everything was so confusing right now, but she didn’t have time to dwell on it yet. She’d do that later.

The thought of how much blood Danny had lost weighed against her, and Valerie jogged to the driver’s side of the van. The door was dented and it took several good tugs for her to wrench it open. Getting into the seat was another hassle, since the area wasn’t really built to accommodate metal battlesuits. Her knees scraped against the steering wheel and Valerie fished for the lever to slide her chair back a bit in the restrictive area. Sure, Jack could fit here with a bit of adjustment, but the position that the seat had just been in made her think that Jack hadn’t been the last person to drive.

Valerie’s hands shook as she slammed the door shut and jammed the key into the ignition. She really wasn’t supposed to do this without a licensed driver sitting next to her, but the situation was a little too desperate for that. In the space behind the back seat she could hear Danny sobbing and his parents murmuring words that were lost beneath the constant drumming of rain on the roof. She curled her hand around the steering wheel and turned the key… and the van gave a terrific jolt, jerking as its engine cut out.

Figures. She knew that the van was a piece of crap but for it to not even turn on? They really needed a new one.

Valerie turned the key again, carefully this time. She pressed her foot against the brake in case it tried to move before she was ready… and the van jerked again, the engine making a terrible clunk before shutting down a second time.

“It’s a manual!” Jack shouted.

Valerie swore and slapped the steering wheel. “I’ve never  _ been _ in a manual!” she snapped, peering into the darkness at her feet. Sure enough, there were three pedals there, which she hadn’t even noticed in the stress of the situation.

She hoisted herself out of her seat, twisting through the gap between the two chairs so that she was in the back. Jack got out of the van with a huff, moving around the outside so that he could take her place behind the wheel.

Valerie climbed over the back seat as well, her helmet tapping against the roof as she pulled herself into the open area in the rear of the RV. The engine rumbled to life and as the car lurched forward she grabbed a rack of weapons that was screwed to the wall to brace herself.

“Sorry,” she said, feeling strangely guilty.

Maddie didn’t even spare her a glance. “Come help me, then.”

The van jolted and Valerie stumbled, her grip on the weapons rack the only thing that stopped her from being thrown off her feet. Maddie was unaffected by the inertia, floating about an inch off the floor. Valerie had a fleeting thought of how convenient ghost powers seemed to be, but the sight of Danny brought her back to the situation at hand.

He lay on a metal table that looked like it had folded down from the wall. Blood and ectoplasm were all over his body, and still streamed from a gash in his arm. She hadn’t noticed it before but it must have been from the fight with that armour ghost. Stinker? Sulker? It was sometimes difficult to figure out their names when Phantom seemed to communicate non-verbally half the time, and in a completely foreign language at others.

“Just let it go,” Maddie was soothing. “Whatever you’re hiding, it’s okay now.”

Valerie moved closer to them, bracing herself against the edge of the table and trying to ignore how quickly her heart was beating. “What’s going on?”

Danny’s eyes were squeezed shut and he gripped his mother’s hand. Maddie held the battery pack from an ectogun above one of his wounds, drizzling ectoplasm from its split casing. The thick liquid dripped onto his skin and was immediately absorbed like spilled wine soaking into a carpet.

“He’s still using his core,” Maddie said. “I saw something when his powers got shorted out for a minute during the fight and I realised he’s been changing his appearance.” She turned back to him. “Danny, sweetie, I need you to let go of your illusion.”

His head lolled in a vaguely negative gesture.

Valerie’s thoughts clicked into place and she  _ knew _ what was going on. “You idiot,” she hissed, gripping the table with one hand to keep steady while she used her other hand to gently cup his face. “We know what you’re hiding, so stop wasting your energy.”

“Doesn’t use that much,” he wheezed.

She lightly nudged his shoulder. “Stop it. When you’re this hurt,  _ any _ energy is bad.”

Maddie was staring at her and Valerie wondered how much she understood. She didn’t know much about halfas’ capacity for sensing emotions, but Danny always seemed to know exactly what to say for how she felt at any given time, so it wasn’t too much of a stretch to guess that Maddie could feel the guilt welling within Valerie’s heart.

Danny shuddered and they both held him in place as the van swung around a corner. “Alright,” he rasped. He still looked awful, but somehow a tiny bit better than before, and Valerie wondered how much the concentrated ectoplasm dripping from the power cell had already helped. He was still paler than any living thing should be, but at least he no longer faded at the edges like an old polaroid photograph.

A soft glow rippled over him like stones dropping into a still pond, and his skin lost its perfect smoothness. Ridges of scars formed beneath the blood, so numerous that in some places they traced along his form like streets on a roadmap. There were roping slashes left by claws and blades, dark patches of fresh burns, silvery splashes from older ones, and beneath it all arced branching green tendrils of lightning…

“Surprise,” Danny tried in a weak voice, smile transparent and fading fast. Despite the extra energy, he was flagging, though Valerie figured that that was to be expected with the severity of his injuries.

Valerie felt her heart stutter and Maddie made a strangled sound.

A large scar sliced across his face, beginning near his right temple and bridging over his nose before ending on the opposite cheek. It barely missed his eye and Valerie drew her hand away from his face as her eyes burned.

She had given that one to him. She remembered it clearly.

Danny groped for her hand, and his fingers were freezing as they bumped against hers. “S’okay,” he breathed, and Valerie hadn’t realised that it was possible to hate herself this much.

“Here,” Maddie interrupted, and pressed the fuel cell into Valerie’s palm. “Keep dripping it into his cuts. I’ll go get another one.”

Valerie held the small cube above the wounds in his chest, and the dripping ectoplasm glowed so brightly that looking at it left smears across her vision, like when you stared directly into a torch and then tried to see in the darkness. “How’d you concentrate ectoplasm this much?”

Maddie jimmied the fuel cell out of another blaster. “I’ll show you sometime,” she offered with a small smile. “We owe it to you.”

Guilt pressed against her lungs like knives slipping between her ribs and Valerie winced. “No, you don’t.”

Maddie shook her head. “You saved us with that livestream trick,” she said. Her fingers glowed with power and the plastic casing in her hands split apart. It took a moment, like when you cut yourself and for a second there’s no blood, but then thick green ectoplasm began to drizzle out of the cracks like honey.

Valerie shifted so that Maddie could resume the spot beside her, and Danny groaned as the liquid streamed into his wounds.

“You don’t owe me anything,” Valerie insisted. “I’ve hunted him for  _ years. _ ”

“So have we,” Maddie reminded her.

“A lot of these scars are from me.”

“And you think they’re not from us too?”

Danny grimaced. “Shuddup,” he grunted. “ _ My _ stupid secret…” a hacking cough cut him off, and he rolled onto his side, grasping his chest with a choked sound. More blood and ectoplasm dribbled from his lips, and he leaned against Valerie with a moan.

“Lie down,” she snapped, but he twisted his arm around her waist.

“Don’t be mad,” he rasped. “Not your fault.”

He could sense something, she was certain, and guilt continued to well beneath her ribs like an encroaching tide. In different circumstances she knew she would have been frustrated by this mind reading or whatever it was, but as he tried to tighten his hug she just felt even worse. Danny was covered in scars and bleeding out in the back of his parents’ van and she hadn’t even apologised for anything yet. Why was  _ he _ trying to comfort  _ her? _

The van slammed to a stop. Valerie, unprepared for the loss of momentum, pitched to the side and hit the back of the seats. Her head slammed against the wall and although her helmet absorbed most of the impact it was still enough to fill her sight with tears. She blinked, trying to clear her vision without raising her visor to rub her eyes. Part of her felt wrong at that, like she didn’t deserve to keep things a secret anymore when Danny had been revealed to so many people in one night, but the thought of her father’s reaction when the Fentons inevitably contacted him was enough to keep her facade up for now. He’d learn about the livestream soon enough anyway, it would probably be on the morning news, but at least she could try to control the damage.

It took a moment for her eyes to clear, and she pushed back onto her feet with a groan. Danny had fallen halfway off the table, and his sobs were rough and gasping as his mother pulled him into her arms. Fluids dripped onto the floor and even with his core’s supernatural help, Valerie wondered how he was still breathing. The concentrated ectoplasm must have had something to do with it, and once again she thought about how helpful ghost powers were.

It wasn’t envy, but she caught the thought anyway and pushed it away before she could dwell on it.

The back doors of the van screeched open and Jack motioned to Valerie. “Go open the door,” he ordered. She caught the keys for a second time that night and slipped past the Fentons, racing up the stairs and unlocking the front door for them. She propped it open with a shoe from the entryway and let herself in, turning on the lights and heading straight for the thick metal door with the yellow biohazard sticker. She propped this one open as well and jogged down the stairs. Her metallic footsteps rattled in her ears and she huffed at the sight of piles of guns and charging cables scattered across the floor. Trust the Fentons to have a lab full of safety hazards! She swept them aside as quickly as she could, trying to clear up the space for whatever they needed to do. If it was up to her she would have taken Danny to the hospital, consequences be damned, but she wasn’t a halfa and maybe Maddie knew a better way to treat him.

Their feet sounded loudly on the metal staircase. Danny was cradled in his father’s arms, looking so small and pale, and Valerie’s throat clenched. She swallowed it down and ordered herself not to cry,  _ there would be time for that later _ , and she kicked a few more cables to the side. “What do you need me to do?”

“Put your gloves back on,” Maddie ordered, and Valerie belatedly realised that her hands were smeared with stinging ectoplasm. She headed for the sink and rinsed it off, flinching as water rushed over the blisters that were already beginning to form. What had she been thinking, handling concentrated fuel cells with her bare skin?! Sure, she’d been distracted, but that was just plain stupid.

She patted her hands dry with a wince and put her gloves on, drawing closer to the Fentons. Maddie had dragged a containment tank into the middle of the room and wrenched the lid off, and she jerked her head in the direction of a hulking steel cylinder in a corner of the room. “That’s the ectoplasm store,” she said. “Go make sure the hose is connected and bring it here.”

Valerie hurried over to the tank, ignoring her unease at the thought of storing such a huge amount of something as dangerous as ectoplasm. A large fire hose was bolted to the side of the tank next to a spigot and some gauges, and she gave it a tug to ensure that the connection would hold before unfurling the hose and stretching it back to the middle of the room. The Fentons were working together to lower Danny into the glass box, with Jack holding his shoulders while Maddie held his legs. His eyes were closed, limbs limp and breathing fluttering, and Valerie wondered if he had finally passed out. She dumped the end of the hose into the makeshift bathtub and rushed back to the tank of ectoplasm. She twisted the handle next to where the hose clamped to the side, sighing in relief as the neon yellow tube gurgled and bulged with liquid.

Green slime poured into the containment unit, and quickly rose to cover Danny’s body. He moaned, twitching as his parents supported his head to prevent him from slipping under. Valerie turned the handle to stop the flow once his body was fully submerged, and she moved to stand near the Fentons.

The transparent green ectoplasm clung to him like honey, blooming dark with blood near the gaping wounds in his body. Valerie would have been worried at the sight if not for how peaceful he seemed. Danny looked much better already — his skin shone in the light from the glowing ectoplasm, and his complexion had warmed with colour back in his cheeks. His eyes were closed but his breathing was deep and steady, and the lines that had creased around his eyes and mouth were far less pronounced.

“That’ll heal him?” Valerie asked. The burns on her hands smarted inside her gloves and she wondered how something that hurt her so easily had such a different effect on the dead. Though Danny  _ wasn’t _ dead, and she frowned at how easily she’d almost generalised him. She’d have to think more about halfas later.

Maddie nodded and smoothed his fringe back from where it had stuck to his forehead. “If it has enough of an energy supply his core can heal practically anything except direct damage.”

Something was off in her tone, and Valerie got the sense that things wouldn’t be that easy. “You mean damage to his core?”

“Danny’s core’s immature,” Jack piped in, dipping a cloth in the ectoplasm and gently wiping it across his son’s face. “He’s still developing, so if it gets hurt, it might not heal properly.”

“But his core’s fine, right?” Something tugged at her mind, the memory of one of those awful spikes pulling free from his body. Something think and glowing had glistened on the tip, and Danny had made the most gut-wrenching  _ sound… _

“All of the spikes hit his core,” Maddie said. “I think one of them pulled out a bit.”

Valerie bit down on her bottom lip and tried to ignore her sudden nausea. “Damn it. What’ll that do to him?”

“It’s hard to say,” Jack said. “We haven’t studied it much because a lot of weak ghosts mature pretty quickly and it’s hard to catch them when they’re freshly-formed. Halfas mature slower. It takes about ten years, right, Mads?”

Maddie nodded. “Hopefully it wasn’t enough to cripple any of his powers.” Blood and ectoplasm dripped down her arm and Valerie picked up a cloth from the pile at Jack’s feet. She dipped it in the ectoplasm and held it out to Maddie.

“For your shoulder.”

Maddie’s eyes widened. “Thank you,” she said, shifting to provide access to her injury. She was still cradling Danny’s head to keep it above the surface so Valerie gently pulled away as much of the burned blue HAZMAT as she could and pressed the dripping cloth against the wound. She clumsily tied the cloth around Maddie’s shoulder and upper arm, murmuring an apology as the woman winced.

Valerie’s hands dropped back to her sides and she felt absolutely miserable. “Isn’t there anything else we can do?” she whispered. “He lost a lot of blood.”

Jack shook his head, dipping the cloth again and dribbling it over Danny’s lips. Danny’s eyelids fluttered and his tongue flicked out to collect the drops. Jack dripped more ectoplasm and Danny opened his mouth, eyes blinking open. They glowed green through the slits of his eyelids. “Ow,” he rasped. “What happened?”

Maddie stroked his forehead with her free hand. “You passed out for a minute there.”

“Oh.” He closed his eyes and lay back against her support. “Ectoplasm’s nice.”

“The bath?”

“Mmm,” he grunted. “Never done it before.”

He was obviously still in pain, but he was talking again, so Valerie figured that the ectoplasm really did help. Now that things were less stressful, and the blood had been cleaned from his face, she could see some of his scars in more detail. She’d never realised that her attacks would leave lasting marks on Phantom, since his skin was always so smooth, but now the revelation that Danny had been hiding the scars with his powers weighed against her mind.

There was no excuse for this kind of damage. He had permanent reminders of her vendetta against him, and if he hadn’t been so lucky in the past  _ she _ could have been the reason he was lying in a pool of ectoplasm in his parents’ basement.

Maddie glanced at her sharply and Valerie belatedly remembered her hypothesis of an emotion-mind-reading power as Danny’s brow furrowed. “Val,” he whined.

She held up her hands and they smarted at the movement. “Sorry, don’t worry about me.”

He cracked his eyes open and squinted at her. “Talk later.”

It was a promise that she found herself simultaneously looking forward to and dreading. The scrutiny of his parents did little to calm her nerves, and Valerie swallowed thickly as she realised that he had called her by her name. Danny looked so frail and tired as he floated in the glowing slime and she couldn’t blame him for the slip, but she felt like her secret identity was beginning to dissolve around her.

Danny’s next breath was cold enough to be clearly visible, and a similar stream of cloudy blue air rushed out of Maddie’s lips. Before Valerie could wonder what it was the sensors in her suit began to beep, and the display on the interior of her visor indicated that a ghost had appeared down near the docks.

Danny whined. “Damn ghosts…”

Valerie tapped her glove on the side of the glass tank. “You stay there,” she insisted when he frowned at her. “I’ll get it.”

“It could be powerful,” he wheezed. “My mum-”

“Can stay here with you,” Valerie insisted. “It’s at the docks, so it’s probably just that box one again. It’s about that time of night, right?”

She didn’t wait for him to respond, striding in the direction of the stairs. Her phone vibrated in her pocket with an incoming call and her stomach sank as she realised that she was now an hour over curfew. Her dad was going to be furious. “I’ll drop by in the morning,” she called over her shoulder. “Danny has my number, so text me if you need anything.”

“Thanks,” Maddie called, “and thanks for your help tonight. We really would have been stuck without you, Red.”

Valerie waved her hand and jogged up the stairs, taking them two at a time. She let herself out of the house and locked the front door behind her, standing in the middle of the street and taking a deep breath before clicking her heels together. Her hoverboard folded out from the soles of her boots, and she shot into the sky and followed the beacon on her visor.

Her phone buzzed against her thigh again, and with a verbal command her suit tapped into its bluetooth and answered the call. “Hi, Dad.”

“Where are you?” His voice was the deadly calm of a circling shark.

“I was helping a friend,” she tried. Lights rushed past beneath her in a blur and rain poured as hard as before, so she raised her altitude a bit. The last thing she needed was to hit any particularly tall tree or veer into a high-rise building in this limited visibility.

“In the middle of the night?” he hissed.

She angled her chin petulantly even though he couldn’t see her. “It was pretty sudden,” she said, trying to keep her voice level as she swooped down toward the docks. “Sorry I didn’t call you.”

“What were you helping with?”

She chewed her lip and wished he’d just hang up. This was  _ not _ a conversation she wanted to have over the phone. “We were hanging out and I lost track of time. Sorry, I’m coming home now. I’ll talk to you soon.”

“I got a notification from Amity Park Ghostwatch,” he said.

Green light flashed through the windows of one of the warehouses, and Valerie followed her blinking beacon to peer through the open door. “Oh,” she mumbled, toggling her microphone so it wouldn’t broadcast noise outside her suit and alert the ghost to her presence. “Well, see? I  _ was _ helping a friend. No hunting or anything like that. I’ll explain in a minute?”

She was distracted, and couldn’t see anything through the door except rows of ceiling-high shelves in dim security lighting. Valerie powered down her board and tiptoed into the warehouse, following a glow that shone from between two far shelves.

“How far away are you? I don’t like you walking in this weather.”

“You really think I’m walking?” she huffed as she crept through the building. This was ridiculous. He was aware that she still hunted ghosts, and she was a bit sick of dancing around the topic. “I’m flying.”

“What if you get hit by lightning?”

“The suit protects me,” she said. “It’s like one of those lightning cage things.” She reached her target rows and flattened herself against the shelves, peering around the corner.

Sure enough, the overalled ghost was floating in the middle of the aisle. Boxes bobbed in the air around him like flotsam and he was methodically dumping their contents onto the floor. “Beautiful,” he cooed, running his hands over one of the boxes.

Valerie rolled her eyes and unclipped a thermos from her utility belt. She’d designed it only a few weeks ago after watching Phantom use his so successfully for years, and it had already become her favourite piece of equipment.

Her father’s sigh crackled through the speakers, and he didn’t sound as angry as she had thought he would. Valerie wondered if he had figured out that she wasn’t flying yet. “I still wish you’d be safer,” he grumbled. “We’ll talk about it when you get home.”

She uncapped the thermos, swinging around the corner and jamming her thumb against the button. A red vortex swirled out of the opening and caught the unsuspecting ghost in its radius. He howled and Valerie flinched at the sound as he was sucked into the thermos, glowing boxes and all.

“What was that?” her dad demanded.

“The wind,” she lied, snapping the cap into place and hanging the thermos back onto her belt. “It’s pretty bad out here.”

Styrofoam peanuts were scattered across the floor and Valerie sighed. She jogged back through the building, pressed with the eerie sense that came from being in such a large industrial place without anybody else around. After a moment of silence her sigh was mirrored by her father. “I’ll see you in a minute,” he said.

She mumbled an affirmative sound and he hung up. Valerie headed back out the door, closing it behind her before tapping the heels of her boots and taking to the air once again. Her board hummed beneath her and felt safe and solid, and she tried to ignore thoughts of Danny falling into the darkness as she flew through the rain toward her home.


	10. Rend

Ectoplasm dripped down Danny’s face and he shut his eyes as they began to sting. “Mmph,” he mumbled intelligently, trying to move his hands to rub it off. Cold slime slipped over his cheeks and his arms were far too heavy to lift, so he turned his head away.

“Sorry,” Jack murmured, and Danny felt a cloth swipe across his face. “I thought it was helping.”

“It is,” he managed to say. His slow, wheezing words tugged at a deep pain that he tried to ignore. “Got in my eyes though.” The cloth dragged over his skin again and he blinked. The lights in the ceiling were hazy and far too bright, but as he squinted and blinked away involuntary tears, things came back into focus.

The ectoplasm felt so  _ good _ against his skin, like stepping into a cold shower on a hot Summer’s day. It soothed his wounds, and he lay back and watched the lights above, the hum of hot fluorescence comforting in a way that he couldn’t quite place. It helped to anchor him as his body buzzed with pain and stress. A hand was still under his head, holding it above the surface, and his mother’s fingers gently stroked through his hair.

“Feeling any better?” she asked.

Danny shrugged and winced at the resulting pain. “A bit,” he mumbled, and tried to decipher the sensation in his core. His parents’ concern was like a blanket — it covered everything else in the room and stifled his senses. He nudged past the heavy interference and prodded at his core in an attempt to assess the damage. The problem was that everything hurt right now, but the bath felt nice against his skin, and he figured that it must be doing an incredible amount of good for his injuries.

It didn’t matter that he’d passed out for a minute there, or that things still looked pretty bad. He was going to be fine.

Danny focused inward, and tried to block out external sensation. The ectoplasm lapped at his jawline and he paid closer attention to deep cycles of breathing. It was painful, but nowhere near as bad as before. He hoped that that meant that his lung had begun to repair.

He pushed further and reached for his core. There was a sensitivity there that worried him, and he prodded against it with the same dull sensation that came from nudging tweezers against a piece of glass in your foot. Nothing could really compare to giant needles that had stabbed his stupidly sensitive core, but like glass in your foot, Danny instinctively knew that if he pressed too hard or in the wrong direction, it would just make the pain worse.

He tried to feel for his powers one by one, but at the first tug of energy he realised that was a mistake. Every single puncture wound burned as though nothing else existed. His nerves melted into agony bordering on numbness, and Danny pulled away with a shriek. His core sunk back into its haze and he took a moment to re-orient himself before trying to reassure his parents that he was okay. They fluttered over him like worried birds with their chick, gloved hands skimming across his bare skin in feather-light touches.

“That hurt,” he hissed. He knew that his mother had sensed what he had done, and was grateful that he didn’t have to explain himself further.

“Give it a minute and tell me if you feel anything worse than the rest.”

“Okay.” Danny coughed, thick wetness catching in his throat, and pain ripped through him with the sudden jolt. He tried to sit up, but the congealing ectoplasm encased him as though he was swimming in honey. He struggled to move and breathe all at once. After a moment of panicked spluttering his hands breached the surface and flung ectoplasm everywhere as he gripped the edges of the tank and yanked himself as far upright as he could. His parents’ hands were there in an instant, supporting him and thumping against his back as he wheezed, and fresh blood and ectoplasm filled his mouth. He spat, spluttered a few more times, and sagged against the hands holding him as the ringing in his ears died away and the overwhelming pain receded until he could think again.

“Ugh, coughing’s bad right now,” he whined, blinking away tears and frowning at the blood that streaked through the ectoplasm in a marbled effect. “Oh. That’s weird.”

“Hmm?” Maddie’s glove slipped across his slick back and he leaned into her touch. It was difficult to ignore the stress in the room, but thinking about the strange non-mixing of his blood with the ectoplasm was distracting enough for now.

“The blood,” he said, but his throat caught and he gave another weak cough. It dragged at his injuries and pain bloomed with every movement, and Danny stared at the swirls of red and green as he tried to breathe properly again. He had massive holes punched clean through to his core, and any thought of the possible ramifications was too much to handle right now, so he was grateful when he felt his father’s anxiety shift into the focused enthusiasm that Danny liked to call ‘scientist mode’. Sam and Tucker had teased him when he first coined the term, but it made things easier on difficult days to associate his parents’ excitement with science rather than with tearing Phantom apart.

“They’re immiscible.” Danny raised his eyebrows at the comment and Jack’s mouth curved into a tiny smile. “It means they don’t mix together, like oil and water.”

“Oh.” Danny trailed his hand through the fluid and watched as the swirls broke apart, suspending little red globs in the glowing green. Talking hurt, but it was a distraction, so he kept going. “It doesn’t float like oil.”

“This ectoplasm’s thick,” Jack explained, and rubbed his fingertips together. He pulled them apart and strands of green stretched between them like a gooey spider’s web. “It’s pretty concentrated, but in natural ectoplasm the blood eventually floats.”

“Unless it dissolves first,” Maddie supplied, rubbing gentle circles into Danny’s spine. He gave an appreciative murmur and tried to pay attention to her explanation. “Halfa blood’s the only type that doesn’t. Ectoplasm reacts violently with all other living tissue.” She was still concerned, but he could feel her starting to settle as ‘scientist mode’ kicked in, and so long as she kept rubbing his back like that he didn’t really care what they spoke about. 

“Depends on the concentration, right?” he rasped. His words were slow and caught around syllables but at least he was talking. “Dash poisoned himself once from drinking my ectoplasm, remember?”

Jack chuckled. “He’s lucky his stomach didn’t dissolve.”

“We wondered why you had ectoplasm at school,” Maddie mused, and Danny gave a small nod.

“Yeah, you thought I’d grabbed a sample instead of a water bottle from the fridge,” he said. Now that he thought about it, it was pretty crazy that his  _ half ghost mother _ had never realised that his core was active. Danny had taken to sipping ectoplasm from a black water bottle during class whenever his core felt a bit on edge, and one day Dash had somehow come to the conclusion that he was drinking soda during class. Dash, being the type of person that he was, had snatched up the drink and taken several swigs before realising that anything was wrong. He’d ended up in the hospital for a week, and everybody had fussed over Danny ‘accidentally’ mistaking what was apparently one of his parents’ lab supplies for a bottle of water. There had been an entire review of lab safety in their house, and all samples were finally evicted from the kitchen fridge. Nobody knew how ectoplasm had made it to the fridge in the first place — Jack blamed ghosts, Maddie blamed Jack, and Jazz had lectured them both about becoming lax with laboratory safety.

Danny had innocently sat at the kitchen table the entire time and tried to hide his smirk. It didn’t take long for Jazz to identify the  _ actual _ culprit. After that, Sam bought a bar fridge for the ectoplasm. It hid behind a fake wall panel at the back of Danny’s wardrobe, alongside various weapons and other ghostly things.

Thoughts of Jazz sent a pang through his chest that had nothing to do with his injuries. He’d always found her protective attitude frustrating, but now that she was at a college halfway across the country, he realised that he missed her steady presence during stressful moments like this.

Maddie must have sensed his sudden melancholy, and she wafted cool peace over him like a gentle breeze. “You’ll be alright,” she soothed. “I was worried before, but you’ve got more colour now, and you’re sitting up and talking.”

The pain had ebbed to an unfamiliar throbbing in places that he didn’t even know had nerves. He should probably let them know about that. “My core hurts,” he said. “It’s really bad.”

“I’ll check it once your injuries have closed up,” Maddie said. “You’re not destabilising so it’s not urgent, and I don’t want you to morph until you’ve healed enough to get out of this bath.”

Danny instantly thought about the way his core had been checked earlier that day and grimaced at the memory. “Fair enough.” He looked down at his body with detached fascination. The ectoplasm reached halfway up his chest, covering all of his puncture wounds except the highest one. The hole above the surface was no longer bleeding, and looked like it had been plugged with a scab made out of ectoplasm. It glowed with a luminescence that flared brighter every ten seconds or so. This was in line with his heartbeat and pulsing core, and he watched small tendrils of glowing veins as they branched out from the scab in every direction. “That was really fast,” he commented. “Usually a bad injury takes a couple of days to heal this much.”

“You still need a while longer before you get out,” Maddie told him. “It’ll be slower to heal internally because there’s no direct contact with the ectoplasm.”

Danny nodded. “Maybe lay me back down so all of me is covered again?”

“You sure you can breathe okay now?” Jack asked.

He managed a small shrug. “I think so.”

They helped to lower him back, and Danny could almost ignore the pain with how nice the ectoplasm felt as it washed over his chest and shoulders. The room was quiet again, and he closed his eyes with a sigh. The deep inhalation hurt more than he expected and he realised that he’d just have to keep breathing shallowly until the delicate things inside him re-connected their torn edges.

The silence was beginning to stretch. Dark thoughts of slipping off Valerie’s board and falling through the rain drenched his thoughts and Danny knew that he needed a distraction before he panicked. “Tell me about the other halfas,” he murmured.

Maddie’s fingers brushed through his hair again. “I wouldn’t know where to start.”

Danny huffed as he felt her hesitation. “Please?”

Peace wafted between them, and Danny cracked open an eyelid  to watch as a soft smile crept onto her face. “They’re people,” she said, “just like us, with different lives and personalities. Some of us have lots of powers, some only have a few, and we live in clusters of lairs called clans. Some clans emphasise particular elemental cores, but most of them are a pretty even mixture.”

Something sweet and sad caressed Danny like a gentle wind, and he thought that it might be nostalgia. He closed his eyes again and ran his hands loosely through the ectoplasm. “What’s life like?” he asked. “The only clan groups I’ve visited much in the Ghost Zone are a medieval kingdom and the Far Frozen.”

Surprise pierced the soft emotions in the room, and Danny responded by broadcasting his curiosity. Maddie patted his shoulder. “I’m just amazed that you haven’t met any other halfas,” she explained. “I’m from a group with a lot of ice cores, and we aren’t far from there.”

Danny paused to internalise that information. “But… Frostbite was really surprised to meet a halfa? He said I’m unique?” He tried to squint at his mother but the light was too bright, so he contented himself with pressing his head back a bit so that her supporting hand lay flush against his skin. She was still wearing her gloves, but the energy that passed through the connection was stronger with the increased contact, and he tried to express what words seemed to be failing to do. Danny felt like he was drowning, and grappled with the realisation that he’d been lied to for so long, especially by people he trusted.

“He might have thought that you were created artificially,” she suggested, and enveloped him with reassurance. His doubts were still there, but they dulled into perspective as Maddie continued to comfort him with slow, steady waves of emotion. “You weren’t connected to a clan, and depending on how you first met him, he might have thought that you were made into a halfa without being born as one. Remember, someone your age should already have a mature core.”

Danny mumbled an agreeable sound, and frowned as he flexed his fingers. His hands and feet had started to go fuzzy, like when he slept the wrong way and woke up with pins and needles. It was discomfiting but probably normal, so he distracted himself from the sensation by thinking about what his mother had just said. “It makes sense,” he admitted. “I pretty much fell into the Far Frozen by chance when my core almost froze me. Frostbite helped me to learn the basics of ice powers. I had pretty bad aim, but they let me stay to learn.”

“That was nice of them,” she said. “They don’t usually train halfas, since we tend to have regular competitions. There’s a bit of a friendly rivalry there.”

“Oh!” Jack interrupted, and Danny felt a pang of guilt at excluding him from the conversation. “You told me about those ice tournaments with the yetis! Imagine the kind of elemental combat data we could gather from watching one of those!”

“Maybe we can do a mini one for you when I feel better,” Danny suggested. His father hadn’t seemed put-out by being ignored, but he still didn’t want to risk to possibility. “I’d like to see what Mum can do.”

Jack whooped, his exuberance bursting in the air like popcorn. Danny felt lifted by the unrestrained positive emotion, and it soothed his unsteady mind.

“That would be a good idea,” Maddie agreed.

“I need to make some cryokinetic sensors!” Jack exclaimed. “Do you two need me to do anything or can I go draw up some plans?”

“I think we’re fine,” Maddie said, and Danny snorted at her amusement. He flinched as the motion caused his pain to throb again, and realised with dismay that the tingling had spread all the way up his arms and legs. It wasn’t the nice, laughable fuzziness of sitting with a leg under you for a minute too long — this was the harsher type, with a painful edge that felt like an unrelenting cramp.

His mother’s concern nudged him and Danny answered with unease, “My arms and legs have gone all crampy and tingly. It sort of hurts, and it’s spreading.”

Jack’s anxiety joined theirs, and Danny felt like he was being smothered by the sudden stress. “Move your fingers, Dann-o.”

Danny tried to wriggle his fingers, but they felt numb and swollen, and he wasn’t sure if there was any response. “Are they moving?”

“A bit,” Jack said, and Danny clamped his mouth shut and took a slow breath through his nose. He was suddenly far too tense, and needed something to bring him back down. A glass of green slime usually did the trick, but he didn’t feel like any more ectoplasm. A part of his brain suggested that he was already soaking enough through his skin anyway, so lack of ectoplasm wasn’t the problem here, but as the tingling spread he felt increasingly unstable.

“Is there such a thing as absorbing too much ectoplasm?” he hissed through clenched teeth.

“You haven’t healed enough for anything like that to happen,” Maddie said. “Hang on.” A second later her bare hand clasped his shoulder, and Danny groped with numb fingers until he managed to grab her wrist. His awareness of her emotions sharpened, and he tried to help her share what he was experiencing. The tingling pain continued to spread, and Danny shuddered as it filled the rest of his body and began to sink into his core.

Maddie pulled away and Danny whined at the sensation — without preparation or mutual movement it felt like ripping a bandaid off his soul. “Sorry,” she murmured, and he responded with a reproachful jab.

“What’s wrong?” Jack asked.

“I don’t know,” Maddie confessed. “Injuries to immature cores are rare, and I didn’t really study them beyond basic first aid.”

“Well what  _ do _ you know?” Danny rasped. His insides buzzed with static, and any attempt at opening his eyes made his head spin.

“This is a bit delayed from the time of injury, so your core’s probably just trying to restore equilibrium.”

“Huh?”

“It’s like when your computer shuts down and then when you turn it back on it starts up all its programs again,” she clarified. “Your body does the same thing whenever your powers have been suppressed.”

“This doesn’t feel like that,” Danny whined, trying to flex his limbs in the hope that it would dispel some of his discomfort. “I mean, it did before, when the bath was nice, but now I feel like ants are crawling inside me.” He knew what she was trying to say, but this wasn’t the rush of returning power — it was too painful for that.

“Let’s get him out,” Jack suggested.

Maddie murmured in agreement and Danny winced as hands hooked under his armpits and behind his knees. He gasped at the accompanying rush of pain as he was pulled from the ectoplasm, but when he tried to look around the world tilted alarmingly and his stomach tightened with sudden nausea. The lights burned like staring at the sun, and so he shut his eyes again and struggled to stay calm as his parents moved him onto a hard, flat surface a few paces away. It was probably the bench, but he wasn’t about to try looking.

“Do you think it hurts so much because something’s wrong?” he wheezed. Someone lifted his head and tucked something soft under it. Distress buzzed through the air like the wasps in his veins, and Danny hoped that they’d be honest with him.

“Probably,” Jack admitted from somewhere near his feet. “Mads?”

“We need a proper examination,” she answered. “It doesn’t look good though. I thought I saw something before but the rain made it hard to tell. When he didn’t have a reaction to the bath I figured I was wrong. Danny, sweetie, do you feel like any parts are missing?”

It was difficult to focus. The bench felt slippery against his ectoplasm-covered back, and Danny wondered how close he was to sliding off. A core exam was the last thing he wanted right now, but it was becoming harder to breathe again. The image of the spikes pulling from his body floated through his thoughts…

The epicenter of the pain burned at the base of his ribs, and things suddenly made a sickening amount of sense.

“They took a piece,” he choked. He felt his mother grow still, and dimly sensed her grasping his unresponsive fingers. He tried to express his horrible realisation but the buzzing blocked his ability to read emotion, and all he felt was static in return. “The spike… near the bottom of my chest… there was a bit of  _ core _ on it…”

“Are you sure?” Jack asked.

Danny didn’t bother answering. He’d felt it when it happened, but with everything else going on he hadn’t realised how bad the damage was. That terrible sense of wrongness crept back, and he braced himself as he felt the cool probe of intangible hands slipping into his body. It unsettled him that she hadn’t even given him time to change forms, but then she reached the vicinity of his core and everything else fell away.

Pain exploded through every nerve. His muscles melted, his blood felt like  _ acid, _ and Danny only realised that he was screaming when his body slammed into the floor and he had to stop to gasp for air. The agony ebbed like a wave, but he already felt more swelling inside him, spreading through his body and reaching tongues of fire down his arms and legs. He squinted his eyes open and tried to get his hands under him, attempting to move from where he had fallen on his stomach, but he forgot to breathe when he saw the skin on his arms and the backs of his hands.

“Mum?” he whispered.

He couldn’t hear anything over the rapid beating of his heart and core. Two sets of knees slammed into the concrete in his line of sight and his parents grabbed his arms and shoulders. He dimly felt them try to move him but he was locked in place, tense and trembling as he stared in horror at his hands. It was like a terrible  _ Dead Teacher _ movie — large swathes of skin split and curled back as he watched helplessly. Blood and ectoplasm welled to the surface and dripped onto the floor. The same thing happened along the backs of his arms, and Danny shrieked as he felt like knives flayed apart his shoulders and back. The splits widened, entire sections of his skin sloughing off in mere seconds, and Danny screamed for his mother as his body cramped and something black glinted beneath the blood and ectoplasm.

The cramping grew worse and he retched, curling in on himself with the movement. Danny couldn’t think about anything other than the pain, it hurt  _ so much, _ and flaying heat dragged across his back and licked down his spine. He wondered why he wasn’t dead yet.

To make everything so much worse, because the universe literally couldn’t seem to give him a break, his diaphragm clenched and white light burst into existence at his waist. The familiar halos swept over him and wrapped waterproof HAZMAT around his bleeding arms. His perfect white gloves were immediately streaked with the fluid from the floor, and he curled tighter, screwing his eyes shut and begging for it to stop. He cried whenever he could breathe, but it was difficult to get enough air and he felt like he was being carved apart…

Something slammed into him with a sickeningly familiar thud, and Danny screamed again as his core shut down. The connection was suddenly gone and the acid trickled away. The pain dulled from bone-melting agony to the searing throb of fresh wounds, and he dimly realised that he’d been shot. His core had been forcibly disabled to stop whatever was happening to him, but thoughts beyond that were too fuzzy, and he felt like he was sinking into darkness.

“Breathe,” someone told him, but their voice was far away.

He wanted to answer, to say that he was trying, but it was just too hard. 

“C’mon, Danny, keep breathing!”

He just…

needed…

to...

sleep

.

.

.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Wow, it's been... a month. Whoops. I'll try to be a bit more regular!  
> Thanks for reading!


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